Author: Online Portal

UNITED NATIONS, UN member states have much work to do to finally agree a treaty to protect the high seas before scheduled negotiations close in five days, participants and observers say.

After 15 years of formal and informal talks, delegates have been meeting in New York since Feb 20 for the third “final” negotiating round in less than a year.

“There was progress last week but there are a lot of issues still to resolve,” Nathalie Rey of the High Seas Alliance, which includes some 40 NGOs, said.

“There’s a need to pick up the pace in the second week to make sure that we do get the treaty over the line. I’m still remaining optimistic that’s possible,” she added.

Others, however, are less positive that an agreement can be reached before talks are due to end on Friday.

“Negotiations have been going around in circles, progressing at a snail’s pace,” Greenpeace’s Laura Meller said in a statement.

Acknowledging that many key issues remain unresolved, conference chair Rena Lee urged negotiators to be “flexible and creative” Monday.

Jamaica’s representative said flexibility should not come at the cost of ambition.

“Look forward, look to the best outcome, see how best you can be flexible, otherwise we will not achieve an agreement (and) these 20 years will be a failure and we will have no one to blame but ourselves,” he pleaded.

The high seas begin at the border of countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones, which extend up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from coastlines. They thus fall under the jurisdiction of no country.

While the high seas comprise more than 60 percent of the world’s oceans and nearly half the planet’s surface, they have long drawn far less attention than coastal waters and a few iconic species.

An updated draft text published this past weekend is still full of parenthetic clauses and multiple options on some major issues that will determine the robustness of the final agreement.

Still under dispute is how the marine protected areas, a core part of any future treaty’s mandate, will be created.

“When we left (the previous round of negotiations) in August this was 95 percent good, but we’re worried it’s being watered-down,” Minna Epps, of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said.

Source: Nam News Network

There was none of the U.S. presidency’s muscular, national security-focused approach on display as Jill Biden, in flowery dresses and pin-thin heels, hugged and smiled her way through Namibia and Kenya on her debut trip to the continent as first lady, which concluded Sunday.

Biden used hopeful words to address tough social issues.

“We face many of the same challenges, from climate change to economic inequality to strengthening democracy, which is why the U.S. African Leaders Summit was held in Washington, D.C., in December because it was so important to him,” she said, referring to her husband, President Joe Biden, in a speech to a room full of dignitaries and diplomats who gathered to hear her at Namibia’s State House on Thursday.

“And it’s why I’m proud to be standing here, standing with a strong democracy. … As Joe said at the summit, African voices, African leadership and African innovation are all critical to addressing the most pressing global challenges and realizing the vision. We all share a world that is free.”

She brought along one of her seven grandchildren to spotlight how girls and women can be powerful engines of change.

Jill Biden is up against major hurdles, say analysts who focus on gender and development issues.

“Every country has a woman problem, I would say,” said Caren Grown, a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. “There’s no country around the world in which women are absolutely equal to men across all domains.

“We’ve made a lot of progress globally, and many countries have made progress over the last many years, especially in terms of education. But we still have really big gaps between men and women in employment, labor force participation, earnings. There’s no country around the world where women make more or earn more than men, although the gaps have closed. We’re still not at parity.”

And as young people, women and activists showed Biden on her five-day trip, Africa, too, has a woman problem.

In an informal settlement outside of Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, Biden met a teen who told her how her pregnancy forced her out of 11th grade.

In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, she met with youths at a screening of a South African MTV series that shows that for South Africa’s young women, transactional sex is the norm, not the exception. South Africa’s president has described gender-based violence as “a second pandemic.”

And in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera slum, she and Kenya’s first lady met with women who, because of their lack of access to conventional finance, set up an informal lending network. Systems like these lack the protections or guarantees of banks, and often traffic in much smaller sums.

President Joe Biden — who often refers to himself as “Jill Biden’s husband” — said after her return on Monday that her effort showed his administration’s strong commitment to Africa.

“She met with the presidents and first ladies of both countries,” he said. “She spoke to more than a thousand young people — the first generation born out of apartheid in Namibia. … In Kenya, she met families affected by devastating drought and food insecurity … made worse by Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine. And made it clear that America’s commitment to Africa is real.”

And by choosing to hold all of her high-profile substantive events with female leaders, America’s first lady conveyed a clear message of her own and made a not-so-subtle nod to Namibia’s first lady Monica Geingos, whose husband’s second and final term ends next year.

“It’s always time to have a female president, no matter what country you’re in,” Jill Biden said as she toured a local charitable organization with Geingos on Thursday. “So I’m very supportive of women running for office.”

Analysts say it’s unclear whether the trip will result in new initiatives or policy changes for the continent.

But, Grown says, Biden’s efforts challenge a belief that pervades to this day, and not just on the mother continent: that being born a girl means you lose in life.

“Dr. Biden has been a role model, not only in the education field but with everything that she’s done in her capacity as first lady,” she said. “That gives hope to girls who can grow up knowing that there’s many roles that they can take on as adults, and they can move into fields that might have been denied to them; they might be able to get education.”

Source: Voice of America

DAKAR, The leading factor driving people to join fast-growing violent extremist groups in sub-Saharan Africa is lack of job opportunities, according to a new report released by the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

The report released on Tuesday entitled, Journey to Extremism in Africa: Pathways to Recruitment and Disengagement, underscores the importance of economic factors as drivers of recruitment.

Lack of income, the lack of job opportunities and livelihoods, means that “desperation is essentially pushing people to take up opportunities, with whoever offers that”, said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator, speaking at the report launch.

He added that around 25 pc of all recruits cited a lack of job opportunities as the primary reason, while around 40 per cent said they were “in urgent need of livelihoods at the time of the recruitment”.

Sub-Saharan Africa has become the new global epicentre of violent extremism with almost half of global terrorism deaths recorded there in 2021.

The report draws from interviews with nearly 2,200 different people in eight countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan.

More than 1,000 of those interviewees are former members of violent extremist groups, both voluntary and forced recruits.

A quarter of those who volunteered said the main factor was unemployment – a 92 percent increase from the last UNDP study of violent extremism in 2017.

Around 48 per cent of voluntary recruits told researchers that there had been “a triggering event” leading to them signing up.

Of that figure, some “71 per cent cited human rights abuses they had suffered, such as government action”, said Nirina Kiplagat, main author of the report and UNDP’s Regional Peacebuilding Advisor.

Fundamental human rights abuses such as seeing a father arrested, or a brother taken away by national military forces, were among those triggers cited.

According to the report, peer pressure from family members or friends is cited as the second more common driver for recruitment, including women who are following their spouses into an extremist group.

Religious ideology is the third most common reason for joining up, cited by around 17 percent of interviewees. This presents a 57 percent decrease from the 2017 findings.

The new report is part of a series of three, analysing the prevention of violent extremism. It highlights the urgent need to move away from security-driven responses to development-based approaches focused on prevention, said UNDP.

It calls for greater investment in basic services including child welfare, education and calls for an investment in rehabilitation and community-based reintegration services.

Steiner said a “toxic mix” was being created of poverty, destitution, and lack of opportunity, with so many citing the “urgent need to find livelihoods”. It is tantamount to a society “no longer having a rule of law, turning to some of these violent extremists’ groups to provide security.”

Security-driven counter-terrorism responses are often costly and minimally effective, said the UNDP Administrator, and investments in preventive approaches to violent extremism are inadequate.

Terrorist groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram or Al-Qaeda emerge due to local conditions, but then begin to amass weapons and secure financing – in the case of the Sahel, allowing other cells to resource themselves independently.

“The geopolitical dimension should not surprise anyone”, said Steiner, where States are no longer able to provide the rule of law or meaningful national security, “then the opportunity for other actors to become part of this drama grows exponentially, we have seen it in Mali, we have seen it in Libya, we have seen it at the Horn of Africa”.

Based on the interviews, the report also identified factors that drive recruits to leave armed groups, such as unmet financial expectations, or a lack of trust in the group’s leadership.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK