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Ab Sonntag (31. März) wird in Belgien ein monatlicher Mindestlohn von 2.029,88 Euro gelten. Damit steigt das Land in einen erlesenen Kreis von nur fünf EU-Staaten mit einem Mindestlohn über 2.000 Euro auf, zu dem auch Deutschland gehört.

Russian oil firms face delays of up to several months to be paid for crude and fuel as banks in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates become more wary of US secondary sanctions.

Aujourd’hui dans L’Expresso : l'ambassadeur russe refuse d'expliquer le survol de la Pologne par un missile, la Roumanie réfléchit à réguler TikTok, un député socialiste allemand fervent défenseur de l'Ukraine annonce son retrait de la vie politique, accord CETA en France et possible assouplissement des mesures environnementales de la PAC.

Pour parvenir à la neutralité carbone d'ici 2050, les pays des Balkans, encore ultra-dépendants du charbon, vont devoir cravacher. Leurs dirigeants voudraient bien miser sur le nucléaire, surtout si l'Union européenne met la main à la poche... Voilà ce qui s'est dit lors du premier sommet de l'AIEA, la semaine dernière à Bruxelles.

- Articles / Bulgarie, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Roumanie, Turquie, Serbie, Slovénie, Economie, Environnement, Énergie Balkans, Bulgarie nucléaire

Pour parvenir à la neutralité carbone d'ici 2050, les pays des Balkans, encore ultra-dépendants du charbon, vont devoir cravacher. Leurs dirigeants voudraient bien miser sur le nucléaire, surtout si l'Union européenne met la main à la poche... Voilà ce qui s'est dit lors du premier sommet de l'AIEA, la semaine dernière à Bruxelles.

- Articles / Bulgarie, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Roumanie, Turquie, Serbie, Slovénie, Economie, Environnement, Énergie Balkans, Bulgarie nucléaire

Pour parvenir à la neutralité carbone d'ici 2050, les pays des Balkans, encore ultra-dépendants du charbon, vont devoir cravacher. Leurs dirigeants voudraient bien miser sur le nucléaire, surtout si l'Union européenne met la main à la poche... Voilà ce qui s'est dit lors du premier sommet de l'AIEA, la semaine dernière à Bruxelles.

- Articles / Bulgarie, Courrier des Balkans, Croatie, Roumanie, Turquie, Serbie, Slovénie, Economie, Environnement, Énergie Balkans, Bulgarie nucléaire

Michael Roth, président de la commission des Affaires étrangères du Bundestag et l’un des plus fervents partisans de l’Ukraine, a annoncé son départ de la politique en raison de divergences au sein de son propre parti.

Die NATO tut nicht genug für die Ukraine und muss Russland mehr "strategische Schwierigkeiten" bereiten, um dessen Vordringen aufzuhalten, fordert der schwedische Außenminister Tobias Billström im Interview mit Euractiv. Er blickt dabei vor allem auch auf den Ostseeraum.

Credit: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Mar 27 2024 (IPS)

At last the UN Security Council has passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. While stopping short of demanding a permanent end to the violence, it goes further than the world’s peak peace and security body had so far managed since the start of the current brutal phase of conflict in October. But the time it’s taken to get to this point signals an ongoing failure of global institutions to uphold human rights.

Today’s conflicts around the world – not just in Gaza, but in Sudan, Ukraine and sadly many other places – are bringing immense cruelty and suffering, targeted at civilian populations and civil society. One in six people are currently exposed to conflict. International rules are supposed to make sure atrocities don’t happen, and if they do, the international community works to halt the bloodshed and bring those responsible to justice. But states are repeatedly flouting the rules.

The latest State of Civil Society Report, from global civil society alliance CIVICUS, highlights how international bodies are flailing as states make hypocritical decisions that undermine the rules-based international order. Belligerents are brazenly ignoring long-established tenets of international human rights and humanitarian law because they expect to get away with it. Civil society has global governance reform plans but isn’t getting a seat at the table.

Powerful states including Russia and the USA are demonstrating selective respect for the rules, shielding allies but castigating enemies. This is clear among the many states that rushed to Ukraine’s defence but have hesitated to criticise Israel. At the basest level, some states are displaying racism as they show concern for white people’s human rights but not for those of people of colour.

The Security Council has moved incredibly slowly, hampered by powerful states using their veto, its resolutions watered down through lengthy processes despite the urgency of the situation. States wanting to see an end to conflicts have taken to other arenas, including the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council – but these lack the clout of the Security Council.

Human rights are supposed to be one of the UN’s three pillars, alongside peace and security and sustainable development. But they’re very much the poor relation. The human rights pillar gets only 4.3 per cent of the UN’s regular budget. Problems with funding were plain to see in January, when UN offices in Geneva shut down temporarily due to a liquidity crisis, unable to meet heating costs at the height of a human rights emergency. Around 50 UN member states were reported to have failed to pay their 2023 contributions fully or partly.

Some states are withdrawing from the UN’s human rights scrutiny, with Uganda and Venezuela insisting on the closure of human rights offices in their countries, Sudan’s military kicking out a UN mission tasked with restoring democracy and Ethiopia successfully lobbying for an end to a commission scrutinising the many human rights abuses committed during conflict.

At the same time, repressive states are retaliating against activists who take part in UN human rights processes. The most recent report on reprisals against people for cooperating with the UN documented that over the last year, 40 states punished people for using the UN to stand up for human rights. Shockingly, 14 of them were members of the Human Rights Council – almost 30 per cent of the body’s members. It’s a disgrace that points to a broader problem of a lack of respect for human rights by many states active in the UN.

It goes beyond a failure to uphold human rights in conflict settings. The short-term calculations of unaccountable leaders are neutralising international agreements forged to tackle major transnational challenges such as the climate crisis and sustainable development, where delivery is falling far short. At the Sustainable Development Goals summit held last September, civil society put forward innovative ideas to unlock the money needed to finance development and climate resilience, but these were ignored. Civil society is often denied access, forced at best to sit on the sidelines of the annual high-level opening of the UN General Assembly.

Today’s multiple crises are exposing the fundamental design flaws of international institutions, testing them beyond their limit. If trust in the UN collapses, people could embrace more authoritarian alternatives. To prevent this, states and the UN must take on board civil society’s many practical reform ideas. The UN must become more democratic and it must fully include civil society as an essential partner.

It can start by implementing some civil society reform proposals. The first of these, and an easy one to adopt, is to appoint a civil society envoy, someone who could encourage best practices on civil society participation across the UN, ensure a diverse range of civil society is involved and drive the UN’s engagement with civil society groups around the world. At a time when civil society is under attack in so many countries, this move would signal the UN takes civil society seriously and potentially unlock further progress.

Another step forward would be a world citizens’ initiative, enabling people to mobilise to collect signatures to put an issue on the UN’s agenda. This could ensure that matters proved to have a high level of global public support are given consideration, including at the Security Council. Many in civil society also support a UN parliamentary assembly to complement the General Assembly and give a voice to citizens as well as governments. This could serve as a valuable corrective to the state-centric nature of decision-making and act as a source of scrutiny and accountability over the decisions the UN makes – or fails to make.

Civil society will keep calling for a rules-based order where clear laws and policies are followed to tackle climate change, end poverty, address deep economic inequality, de-escalate conflicts and prevent gross human rights violations. The UN Summit of the Future in September 2024 should commit to advancing this vision. Civil society is doing its best to engage with the process, calling not for more platitudes but for genuine reforms that put people at the heart of decision-making.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 

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L’Occident devrait s’efforcer de créer davantage de « difficultés stratégiques » afin d'influencer le comportement de la Russie, l’objectif principal étant de « mettre fin à l’agression contre l’Ukraine », une tâche dans laquelle l’OTAN ne fait pas assez, selon le ministre suédois des Affaires étrangères.

C'est en passe de devenir un sport national. La Bulgarie se prépare à d'énièmes législatives anticipées après la chute de la douteuse coalition pro-européenne qui s'était mise en place pour limiter l'influence du président Radev. Rien ne va plus entre le GERB et ses partenaires libéraux.

- Le fil de l'Info / Courrier des Balkans, Bulgarie, Politique intérieure, GERB

Nach dem Terroranschlag in Moskau, bei dem rund 140 Menschen ums Leben kamen, hat Italien seine Terrorwarnstufe auf die höchstmögliche Stufe angehoben. Viele Italiener fühlen sich von islamistischem Terrorismus nicht betroffen, doch ein Experte warnt vor Italiens übersehenem Gefährdungspotenzial.

Les membres de la coalition gouvernementale roumaine envisagent une « stricte » règlementation, voire une interdiction de TikTok suite à une enquête suggérant une popularité croissante de l'extrême droite auprès des jeunes, très actifs sur les réseaux sociaux.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the secretary of Ukraine's national security council and replaced him with the head of his foreign spy agency on Tuesday (26 March).

Am Montag, den 25. März, hat der Rat der Europäischen Union einstimmig die überarbeitete Abfallverbringungsverordnung angenommen, die nun EU-Recht ist. Sie zielt darauf ab, die lokale Abfallbewirtschaftung und das Recycling zu stärken und den Abfallexport in Nicht-EU-Länder zu verringern.

Children eating and drinking at the Children's House in Idlib. Abandoned children is a growing issue in the region. Credit: Sonia Al-Ali/IPS

By Sonia Al Ali
IDLIB, Syria, Mar 27 2024 (IPS)

Wael Al-Hassan was returning from work in the Syrian city of Harim when he heard the sound of a baby crying.

He was returning from work on December 10, 2023. He stopped momentarily, turned on his mobile phone flashlight to investigate, and spotted a baby girl, around one month old, wrapped in a white blanket, lying by the roadside.

He felt saddened by the infant’s condition and said, “She was crying loudly, and I saw scratches on her face from cat or dog claws. I then carried her in my arms and took her home, where my wife breastfed her, changed her clothes, and took care of her.”

The phenomenon of abandoning newborns is increasing in northern Syria, where individuals leave their newborns in public parks or alongside roads, then leave the area. Passersby later find the infants, some of them dead from hunger or cold.

Al-Hassan said that the next morning, he handed the baby girl over to the police to search for her family and relatives.

Social Rejection

Social worker Abeer Al-Hamoud from the city of Idlib, located in northern Syria, attributes the primary reason for some families abandoning their children to the widespread poverty and high population density in the province. Additionally, there is fear of the security situation (the area is not in the control of the Syrian regime and is often under attack), the prevalence of divorces, and spouses abandoning their families after traveling abroad.

Al-Hamoud also points out another reason, which is the spread of the phenomenon of early marriage and marrying girls to foreign fighters who came from their countries to Syria to participate in combat. Under pressure from their families, wives often have to abandon their children after their husband’s death, sudden disappearance, or return to their homeland, especially when they are unable to care for them or provide for them financially. Moreover, these children have no proper documentation of parentage.

Furthermore, Al-Hamoud mentions another reason, which is some women are raped, leading them to abandon their newborns out of fear of punishment from their families or societal stigma.

Al-Hamoud warns that the number of abandoned children is increasing and says there is an urgent need to find solutions to protect them from exploitation, oppression, and societal discrimination they may face. She emphasizes that the solutions lie in returning displaced persons to their homes, improving living conditions for families, raising awareness among families about the importance of family planning, and launching campaigns to integrate these children into society.

Alternative Families

It’s preferable for members of the community to accept these children into their families, but they face difficulties in registering the births.

Thirty-nine-year-old Samaheer Al-Khalaf from the city of Sarmada in northern Idlib province, Syria, sponsored a newborn found abandoned at a park gate, and she welcomed him into her family.

She says, “After 11 years of marriage to my cousin, we were not blessed with children, so we decided to raise a child found in the city at the beginning of 2022.”

Al-Khalaf observes that the Islamic religion’s prohibition on “adoption” prevents her from registering the child under her name in the civil registry. Additionally, she cannot go to areas controlled by the Syrian regime to register him due to the presence of security barriers.

She says, “I fear for this child’s future because he will remain of unknown lineage. He will live deprived of his civil rights, such as education and healthcare, and he won’t be able to obtain official documents.”

Children’s House Provides Assistance

With the increasing numbers of children of unknown parentage, volunteers have opened a center to receive and care for the children abandoned by their families.

Younes Abu Amin, the director of Children’s House, says, “A child of unknown parentage is one who was found and whose father is unknown, or children whose parentage has not been proven and who have no provider.”

“The organization ‘Children’s House’ opened a center to care for children separated from their families and children of unknown parentage in the city of Sarmada, north of Idlib,” says Abu Amin. “The number of registered children in the center has reached 267, ranging in age from one day to 18 years. Some have been placed with foster families, while others currently reside in the center, receiving all their needs, including shelter, food, education, and healthcare.”

Upon arrival at the center, Abu Amin notes that the center registers each child in its records, transfers them to the shelter department, and makes efforts to locate their original family or relatives and send them to them or to find a foster family to provide them with a decent life.

Abu Amin explains that the center employs 20 staff members who provide children with care, psychological support, and education. They work to create a suitable environment for the children and support them psychologically to help with emotional support.

He emphasizes that the center survives on individual donations to cover its expenses – which are scarce. There is an urgent need for sufficient support, as the children require long-term care, especially newborns.

A young girl Marah (8) and her brother, Kamal (10), lost their father in the war. Their mother remarried, leaving them to live in a small tent with their grandfather, who forces them to beg and sell tissues, often leaving them without food for days.

Consequently, they decided to escape from home. Kamal says, “We used to sleep outdoors, overwhelmed by fear, cold, and hunger, until someone took us to the child center.”

Upon reaching the center, they returned to their studies, played with other children, and each other, just like children with families.

Kamal expresses his wish, “I hope to continue my education with my sister so we can rely on ourselves and escape from a life of injustice and deprivation.”

These children, innocent of any wrongdoing, are often left to fend for themselves, bearing the brunt of war-induced poverty, insecurity, homelessness, instability, and early marriage.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Der französische Senat hatte das umfassende Wirtschafts- und Handelsabkommen zwischen der EU und Kanada (CETA) abgelehnt, und die Nationalversammlung könnte kurz vor den Europawahlen dasselbe tun. Macrons Regierung könnte die Entscheidung des Parlaments jedoch ignorieren.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ACCRA, Ghana, Mar 27 2024 (IPS)

The IMF no. 2 recommends non-alignment as the best option for developing countries in the second Cold War as geopolitics threatens already dismal prospects for the world economy and wellbeing.

IMF warning
Ominously, International Monetary Fund (IMF) First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath warns, “With the weakest world growth prospects in decades – and…the pandemic and war slowing income convergence between rich and poor nations – we can little afford another Cold War”.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

While recognising globalisation is over, she appeals to governments to “preserve economic cooperation amid geoeconomic fragmentation” due to the second Cold War.

Growing US-China tensions, the pandemic and war have changed international relations. The US calls for ‘friend-shoring’ while its European allies claim they want to ‘de-risk’. While still pleading for ‘globalisation’, China realistically stresses ‘self-reliance’.

Multilateral rules were rarely designed to address such international conflicts as ostensible ‘national security’ concerns rewrite big powers’ economic policies. Hence, geoeconomic conflicts have few rules and no referee!

Historical perspective
After the Second World War, the US and USSR soon led rival blocs in a new bipolar world. After Bandung (1955) and Belgrade (1961), non-aligned countries have rejected both camps. This era lasted four decades.

World trade-to-GDP rose with post-war recovery and, later, trade liberalisation. With the first Cold War, geopolitical considerations shaped trade and investment flows as economic relations between the blocs shrank.

According to her, such flows increased after the Cold War, “reaching almost a quarter of world trade” during the “hyper-globalization” of the 1990s and 2000s.

However, globalization has stagnated since 2008. Later, about “3,000 trade restricting measures were imposed” in 2022 – nearly thrice those imposed in 2019!

Cold War economics
Gopinath sees “ideological and economic rivalry between two superpowers” as driving both Cold Wars. Now, China – not the Soviet Union – is the US rival, but things are different in other respects too.

In 1950, the two blocs accounted for 85% of world output. Now, the global North, China and Russia have 70% of world output but only a third of its population.

Economic interdependence grew among countries as they became “much more integrated”. International trade-to-output is now 60% compared to 24% during the Cold War. This inevitably raises the costs of what she terms economic ‘fragmentation’ due to geopolitics.

With the Ukraine war, trade between blocs fell from 3% pre-war to -1.9%! Even trade growth within blocs fell to 1.7% – from 2.2% pre-war. Similarly, FDI proposals “between blocs declined more than those within blocs…while FDI to non-aligned countries sharply increased.”

China is no longer the US’s largest trading partner, as “its share of US imports has fallen” from 22% in 2018 to 13% in early 2023. Trade restrictions since 2018 have cut “Chinese imports of tariffed products” as US FDI in China fell sharply.

However, indirect links are replacing direct ties between the US and China. “Countries that have gained the most in US import shares…have also gained more in China’s export shares” and FDI abroad.

A BIS study found “supply chains have lengthened in the last two years”, especially between “Chinese suppliers and US customers”. Hopefully, Gopinath suggests, “despite efforts by the two biggest economies to cut ties, it is not yet clear how effective they will be”.

For Gopinath, trade restrictions “diminish the efficiency gains from specialisation, limit economies of scale due to smaller markets, and reduce competitive pressures.”

She reports IMF research suggesting “the economic costs of fragmentation… could be significant and weigh disproportionately on developing countries”, with losses around 2.5% of world output.

Losses could be as high as 7% of GDP depending on the economy’s resilience: “losses are especially large for lower income and emerging market economies.”

Much will depend on how things unfold. She warns, “Fragmentation would also inhibit our efforts to address other global challenges that demand international cooperation.”

Policy options
Policymakers face difficult trade-offs between minimising the costs of fragmentation and vulnerabilities, and maximising security and resilience.

Gopinath recognises her ‘first best solution’ – to avoid geoeconomic hostilities – is remote at best, given current geopolitical hostilities and likely future trends. Instead, she urges avoiding “the worst-case scenario” and protecting “economic cooperation” despite polarisation.

She wants adversaries to “target only a narrow set of products and technologies that warrant intervention on economic security grounds”. Otherwise, she advocates a “non-discriminatory plurilateral approach” to “deepen integration, diversify, and mitigate resilience risks”.

Despite the odds, Gopinath appeals for a “multilateral approach…for areas of common interest” to “safeguard the global goals of averting climate change devastation, food insecurity and pandemic-related humanitarian disasters”.

Finally, she wants to restrict “unilateral policy actions – such as industrial policies”. They should only address “market failures while preserving market forces”, which she insists always “allocate resources most efficiently”.

Not recognising the double standards involved, she wants policymakers “to carefully evaluate industrial policies in terms of their effectiveness” But, she is less cautious and uncritical in insisting on neoliberal conventional wisdom despite its dubious track record.

Unsurprisingly, two IMF staffers felt compelled to write in 2019 of ‘The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named’. Despite much earlier extensive European and Japanese use and US President Biden’s recent embrace of industrial policy, the Fund seems caught in an ideological trap and time warp of its own making.

While making excessive claims about gains from globalisation, Gopinath acknowledges “economic integration has not benefited everyone”.

Thankfully, she urges developing countries to remain non-aligned and “deploy their economic and diplomatic heft to keep the world integrated” as the new Cold War sets the world further back.

Pragmatically, Gopinath observes, “If some economies remain non-aligned and continue engaging with all partners, they could benefit from the diversion of trade and investment.”

By 2022, “more than half of global trade involved a non-aligned country…They can benefit directly from trade and investment diversion”, reducing the Cold War’s high costs.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Nachdem eine russische Rakete am Wochenende kurzzeitig in den polnischen Luftraum eingedrungen ist, hat der russische Botschafter nun eine Vorladung ins polnische Außenministerium ignoriert. Polen denkt über Konsequenzen nach.