Emmanuel Macron s’apprête à formuler ses propositions en vue d’approfondir la construction européenne. Une initiative indispensable pour remédier au sentiment de l’impuissance publique en France, plaide le professeur des universités à Sciences Po et Directeur général de la Fondation pour l’innovation politique. Ce n’est qu’en apparence que la construction européenne contredit l’idée de souveraineté nationale […]
Cet article La souveraineté européenne, dernière chance pour la France d’écrire l’histoire est apparu en premier sur Fondapol.
Three experts including IPI Visiting Fellow Alexandra Novosseloff discussed UN Security Council reform in this TRT World segment, touching on the divisive issues the world body faces such as nationalism and a lack of political will.
Ms. Novosseloff noted that, “the Security Council is a reflection of the divisions of the world,” but still believes that we should remain optimistic of the Security Council’s ability to adapt. Though the possibility of reform was discussed by all three experts—Ms. Novosseloff was joined by Mona Khalil of Independent Diplomat and Salman Shaikh of the Shaikh Group— she argued that expanding the Security Council would mean more voices which could complicate the process further.
Despite these shortcomings of the Security Council to act in situations such as Syria and Myanmar, the three experts remained optimistic that the change was possible, with Ms. Novosseloff arguing that the “UN has been reforming itself for decades.”
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IPI and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) of Switzerland co-sponsored a policy forum on September 22, 2017 to share and discuss the conclusions and recommendations of the second regional conversation on “Investing in Peace and Prevention in the Sahel-Sahara” held in N’Djamena, Chad four months ago.
That meeting, which addressed the nature of violent extremism in the region as perceived by those directly affected by it (main conclusions here), had followed the first one, in Dakar in June, 2016, and a precursor seminar in Tunis in November, 2015.
This latest discussion featured a panel of participants from the N’Djamena talks, one of whom, Jean-Daniel Biéler, Special Adviser for Central Africa, Human Security Division of the FDFA, acknowledged that violent extremism in the Sahel had not diminished since the Dakar meeting 15 months ago but asserted that he now saw “a lot of advances that are important for our understanding of what could be a preventative approach.”
“We have seen that there is no specific profile for a violent person,” he said, “but there is a profile of the groups who use violence to get to their goals, and they will use all cracks and gaps in our social structure to get through.”
To forestall that, he said, “we need to re-anchor our own political values where we are practicing them–from representative elections, to access to political expression, to environmental preservation. Communities, NGOs, and states have to take our responsibilities and open the door for dialogue wherever it is.”
Olivier Zehnder, Switzerland’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said the N’Djamena talks had shown that “there are more and more voices that want to gain in preventing violence. The main thing that comes out of these conversations is that we have to speak, and to speak, we have to meet.”
Steven Siqueira, Deputy Director of the UN Office of Counterterrorism, said that while it had become clear that “harsh crackdowns and heavy handed approaches can be counterproductive,” more emphasis needed to be put on developing alternative approaches. “We’ll only succeed in addressing the increasingly transnational threat of terrorism if we develop a new and comprehensive agenda for multilateral cooperation with a focus on prevention,” he said.
Specifically, he said, “the international community must do more to address the roots of radicalization including real and perceived injustices, high levels of unemployment, and grievances among young people.”
Involving women directly in negotiating for peace and preventing violence was the fervently uttered demand of Madeleine Memb, journalist and representative of MediaWomen4Peace in Cameroon. The fact that women in the region are burdened by living with debilitating personal loss and in real distress does not inhibit their ability to make a meaningful contribution, but quite the opposite, she argued.
By way of example, she said, “We questioned a woman who saw her child beheaded in front of her, and she said, ‘What I am looking for is that women need to be supported.’”
“Can women play a role in investment policy?” she asked. “I say, ‘Yes.’ At the high level, understand feminist existence, women participating actively in decision-making levels, to orient policy to take into account what they are seeing, what they are living.”
Asserting that when women go into politics, policies become more effective, she contended, “It’s time now that we give women the means, which, contrary to what you might think, is not a question of material means, but it’s psychological solutions, answers, words to reflect on their suffering, to try to understand what’s happening to them, to try to understand why their child is being radicalized.”
Aliyu Gebi, Senior Special Adviser of the Nigerian Ministry of Interior, said that though his region suffered from “weaponized poverty, layered with weaponized religion and weaponized politics,” he believed peace was still possible if organized society adjusted itself to the “reality on the ground.”
He defined peace as “the ability to allow my children to go outside and play, to go to the mosque, park, market, movies, to come back home without my worrying about where they are. Peace means mothers allowed to be mothers, fathers to be fathers, and children to be children,” he said. But he warned, “At any point in time that this balance is disturbed, there will be problems in society.”
An optimistic note was sounded by Gali Ngothé Gatta, parliament member from Chad. “The Lake Chad region is being rebuilt even though a few Boko Haram fighters are sowing death and destruction,” he said. “The first sign of progress I observed in Chad was the actors associating themselves together to help communities reorient themselves.”
Among them, he identified agricultural workers, religious leaders, women’s organizations, local politicians, members of civil society, and the international community including NGOs, the European Union and the UN.
He concluded: “The state had a monopoly on the debate, but now it’s an open debate, discussing what is going on, why they are mobilizing young children in violence.”
Youssef Mahmoud, IPI Senior Adviser, moderated the discussion.
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“It’s a place with hope in very short supply, Yemen,” said Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, opening his presentation at an IPI Humanitarian Affairs Series event on “Addressing the Humanitarian Situation in Yemen” September 22nd.
“There is no citizen in that country spared by what’s going on,” he said. “What you’ve got is a man-made crisis with people touched by it who have no power to stop it.”
A two-and-a-half-year-old conflict in Yemen has turned the country into what the UN says is now the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and largest food insecurity crisis.
The current hostilities erupted in March of 2015, just months after the arrival of Mr. McGoldrick, a seasoned UN humanitarian official with past service in places like Nepal, Pakistan, Georgia, and Lebanon. The conflict pitted a Saudi-led coalition loyal to the internationally recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied with the Houthi rebel movement and widely thought to be supported by Iran.
As a result of fighting since then–much of it involving devastating attacks from the air–the economy is now near collapse, public and private services have all but disappeared, and average citizens, having lost their livelihoods and whatever savings they had, face tremendous hardship while the most vulnerable are struggling simply to survive.
Supplying the stark details, Mr. McGoldrick said that 7 million Yemenis faced the threat of famine, and that there are already 650,000 cases of cholera, a statistic he said was expected to rise. Food insecurity, already critical, has jumped 20 percent this year; 50 percent of all health structures have been destroyed; 1.2 million civil service workers, 30,000 of them health workers, have not been paid, and up to 10,000 people, by the count of the Norwegian Refugee Council, have died prematurely without treatment or because travel out of the country is blocked.
“People go in villages and die because there’s no health service for them,” he said. “They die because the cancer services don’t work, the blood bank doesn’t work, dialysis doesn’t work, insulin’s not available.”
Air strikes in the first six months of 2017 equal the number in all of last year, and military activity is “heavily stalemated,” he said. “There are many instances of armed clashes, shellings and IEDs, and their indiscriminate nature is unparalleled.”
There is an overall disdain for international humanitarian and human rights law by all parties in the conflict, with killing and wounding of civilians, recruitment of child soldiers, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and unlawful restrictions on the passage of humanitarian assistance.
“The belligerents understand their obligations under the Geneva Conventions, but there’s a blatant disregard for them,” Mr. McGoldrick declared. “No matter what we do to talk to the parties, we get silence, we get indifference, and until that changes, we will have this recurring humanitarian nightmare.”
Everyone realizes that the war is a “massive failure,” he said, “but we still have to get the parties to be much more willing to accept a political solution.”
In a final commentary on the inhumanity of the situation, he said, “You never hear any of these parties ever say caring statements about the population. That’s not what they care about. What they care about is political gain, and that has to change.”
He said the only way a humanitarian response can get through is “to end the war.”
The moderator was Warren Hoge, IPI’s Senior Adviser for External Relations.
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On Thursday, September 21, 2017 IPI held its fifth Ministerial Dinner on Peace Operations in its Trygve Lie Center for Peace, Security, and Development. The dinner was attended by foreign and defense ministers, a United Nations senior official, and former members of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), who discussed the recent debates on the reform of peacekeeping operations and adoption of Security Council Resolution 2378, as well as the broader reforms proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres.
The event was chaired by Terje Rød-Larsen, President of IPI, and co-hosted by Finland, Uruguay, Indonesia and Rwanda, represented respectively by Timo Soini, Finland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs; Enrique Loedel, Uruguay’s Vice-Minister of Political Affairs; Dian Triansyah Djani, Indonesian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and Valentine Rugwabiza, Rwanda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Member of the Cabinet.
In a roundtable debate, conducted under the Chatham House rule of non-attribution, attendees had an open discussion on the most pressing issues confronting contemporary UN peace operations, while taking into account the recommendations contained in the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) and the reforms proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres.
The discussion began with Arthur Boutellis, Director of the Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations at IPI, briefly presenting the (forthcoming) IPI Peace Operations Reform Scorecard 2017, which analyzes the implementation of the recommendations from the HIPPO.
Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, presented some of the progress made and challenges remaining on peace operations reform, and how the reforms proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres will help address some of the latter.
The ensuing discussion stressed the importance of political strategies guiding peace operations, the need to increase women’s participation in peacekeeping and in peace processes, the need to further institutionalize consultations with troop-contributing countries during the mandating process, and the importance of regional partnerships (especially the African Union). Many also emphasized the importance of training, performance and accountability, and for a change in mindset to accompany the reforms proposed by the Secretary-General. Member states represented included Korea, Italy, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Croatia, Namibia, Norway, Sweden, Ghana, Japan, Estonia, France, Mexico, Netherlands, Turkey, Nigeria, Argentina, Azerbaijan and the Slovak Republic.
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Joan M. Larrea, The Chief Executive Officer of Convergence, said that when she was first asked to participate in conversations about how business interacts with peace processes, she thought everyone knew that peace is good for business, “and I also thought it was obvious that business is good for peace.”
“But,” she said, “apparently it’s not that obvious to all parties, hence this report.”
Her reference was to the report “A New Way of Doing Business: Partnering for Peace and Sustainable Development,” a collaboration between IPI, the Sustainable Development Goals Fund and Concordia, and the focus of a September 21st IPI policy forum on “Changing the ‘Business as Usual’ Model: A New Way to Partner for Peace and the 2030 Agenda,” sponsored by the same three organizations.
“We’re long past everybody thinking of business as a rapacious race to the bottom,” Ms. Larrea told the forum. “Economic growth is a prerequisite for peace, and economic growth comes from business, it comes from companies, it comes from investment. So for me the link is obvious.” With emphasis, she concluded, “Peace is really good for business, but business is really, really good for peace.”
Terje Rød-Larsen, President of IPI, said the institute had decided to explore the linkages as part of its research into applying the Sustainable Development Goals “because without business, implementation of the SDGs is not possible. In the end the UN needs the business community, and vice-versa.”
Matthew Swift, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Concordia, said his organization felt there was a need for translating the public and private sectors to each other.
“Those sectors speak very different languages, but as an institute that focuses on what public-private sector cooperation can achieve, it’s important to get both on the same page,” he said. “And the SDGs do a very nice job communicating to CEOs around the world ways in which they can follow this framework of the seventeen goals towards both changing the way they do business but also thinking about the role the private sector has in various communities.”
Paloma Durán, Director of the SGD Fund, said putting into effect these synergies in the context of the UN presented a particular set of challenges.
“How to engage the private sector, keeping in mind that the private sector is not one homogenous actor and there are different sizes, different regions with different practices,’ she said. She also emphasized that businesses needed to be responsible partners and to incorporate the 2030 Agenda into their core business strategies and policies.
While it was important for the UN to engage big corporations with large resources, she said, “we need to work with small and medium-sized business; not because we want the private sector only as a donor, but because we want a real actor working with us.”
Peter van der Vliet, Director of Multilateral Organizations and Human Rights of the Netherlands, said he was encouraged by the opportunities for collaboration offered by the SDGs and by the growing interest of business in having an impact beyond simply making money. “Whether it’s big multinational corporations or small enterprises, the private sector is increasingly not only about making a profit,” he said. “And try to find one SDG where the private sector does not have an impact, just one. From goal one to goal seventeen, the role and conduct of business is crucial.”
Hedayetullah Al Mamoon, Senior Secretary in the Ministry of Finance of Bangladesh, said that “we should be careful about the difference between developed countries and developing countries because our private sector is not so strong.” He stressed that less developed countries need support to use and scale up innovative financial mechanisms to attract more private investments. The report highlights how new partnerships can be forged to finance the SDGs.
Mats Granryd, the Director-General of GSMA, the trade body that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide and is focused on leveraging broad-based technologies for sustainable development, said members of his group reached more than 5 billion people in their effort “to connect everyone and everything to a better future.”
“There’s no better way of describing that better future than the SDGs,” he said.
Tonye Cole, co-founder and Executive Director of the Sahara Group, said the SDGs had shaped a defining rationale for his business operations, particularly in Africa.
“The SDGs in themselves have created a tool,” he said, “a mechanism for business so we can look at ourselves and say we actually have a voice.”
“And now we can itemize them and say, ‘I do SDG five, I believe in SDG eight, I actually have for years been doing SDG one’,” he said. “Now businesses can actualize it and put words to it.”
To meet the scale and ambition of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the private sector will have to play a central role. The agenda provides a window of opportunity for the private sector, governments, the UN, and civil society to collaborate with each other through a new global partnership.
This report explores what is needed to make this new partnership a reality, including the steps that both the UN and the private sector need to take. It also seeks to understand how the private sector can contribute to achieving peace as both an enabler and an outcome of the 2030 Agenda. Finally, the report aims to address how to mitigate the risk companies face in investing in countries facing challenges in attracting private domestic and international investments.
The report offers a number of recommendations for the private sector, the UN, and governments to engage in new forms of collaboration:
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Speaking at the 10th annual Trygve Lie Symposium on Fundamental Freedoms at IPI, Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende said that religious minorities are the “most vulnerable people in the world” and that it was impossible to “separate freedom of religion from other civil rights like the rights to privacy and assembly and expression.”
The title of this year’s symposium, co-sponsored by IPI and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held on September 21, 2017, was “Promoting the Freedom of Religion or Belief,” and Mr. Brende noted that “collective religious hatred is not a natural phenomenon, it is man made.” Therefore, he argued, we have the power to end it, and “it is our moral obligation to work for a solution.”
Pointing out how widespread religious persecution is, IPI President Terje Rød-Larsen opened the meeting by noting that three quarters of the world’s population “still live in countries with high restrictions when it comes to freedom of religion or belief.”
Zeid bin Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that religious systems have been “among the roots of human rights law and International Humanitarian Law” and that he was convinced that “religious leaders with their considerable influence over the minds of millions can be consequential human rights actors in the world today.”
He added that religious minorities must be “free to fully participate in all areas of society, though it must be clear that they cannot impose their beliefs on others.”
Retno Marsudi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, noted that her country, the world’s largest Muslim nation, also was home to Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists and many other faiths. “Freedom of religion is in the DNA of Indonesia,” she said. “Tolerance is what holds us together as a nation.”
In a reference to the dangers of both Islamic fundamentalism and Islamophobia, she said, “Religious extremism has falsely used religion to justify their inhuman policies and they abuse the guarantee of freedom of expression promised by democracy.”
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the British Minister of State for the Commonwealth and the UN, said the key to tackling extremism was resisting intolerance. “You must be intolerant of intolerance,” he said. “If we nip it in the bud, that intolerance will not rear its ugly head as discrimination, and that will not turn into persecution, and persecution will not turn into human suffering.”
Mark Lattimer, Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International, warned against treating religious identity as something separate from a human right.
“When we speak about freedom of religion and belief, it is not just about freedom to worship,” he said. “Those are vital rights, but if you look at the face of religious rights, what you see is targeted persecution based on religious identity.”
He said that “the individual right to freedom of religion and belief, the collective persecution on account of identity, the mobilization of communities for political purposes all are different phenomena with different solutions, and we need to be careful about abandoning human rights solutions in favor of others.”
Ulrik Vestergaard Knudsen, Denmark’s Permanent Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, reported that his government raised the issue of religious freedom in international meetings “as much as possible” and at home was about to create the new post of ambassador for religious minorities.
Norwegian parliamentarian Abid Raja said that the three-year-old International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief, of which he is a member, now had representatives in more than 65 countries and was growing.
Several speakers referred to persisting instances of religious persecution, particularly the forced expulsion of the Rohingya Muslim minority from Myanmar. In his comment, Mr. Borge said, “The fact that we are using the words ‘genocide’ and “ethnic cleansing’ to describe events unfolding in 2017, 70 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a disgrace.”
IPI President Terje Rød-Larsen moderated the discussion.