Dangerous: New EU president Herman Van Rompuy extols ‘global governance’

Daily Mail | Jan 2, 2010

By Paul Belian, Belgian Lawyer And Historian

Perhaps, like many, you think Herman Van Rompuy, who took office as the first EU President on Friday, is a harmless figure of fun. Well, you’re wrong.

Van Rompuy, a former prime minister of Belgium, represents the ‘Belgianisation’ of Europe – a process which began 180 years ago and for which Britain has only itself to blame.

There is ominous symbolism in a Belgian ruling the EU. During the Second World War, Churchill called the Belgians ‘the most contemptible of all – a nation which vainly hoped to stay out of this war, no matter what they owed to those who had saved them in the last war’.

Yet the Belgian political model has since then stealthily conquered Britain, turning Brussels, not London, into the centre of power from which decisions are imposed on the British people.

Belgium was created by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston in 1830-31. It is home to six million Flemings, three million Walloons and one million people in bilingual Brussels.

The country came about after French-speaking Walloons broke away from the Netherlands and tried to join France. Palmerston recognised the rebels on condition that they established a new state and remained neutral.

At first, everyone was sceptical about Palmerston’s creation. Even Belgium’s first king, Leopold I, said: ‘Belgium has no nationality and it can never have one. Basically, Belgium has no political reason to exist.’

By the late 19th Century the Belgian political elite had developed an ideology with a striking similarity to modern Europeanism. In 1904, the ideologist Leon Hennebicq wrote: ‘Have we not been called the laboratory of Europe? Indeed, we are a nation under construction… the solution is economic expansion, which can make us stronger by uniting us.’

His words foreshadowed the Europeanism of the Fifties, which aimed for political unification through economic integration.

But before this could be put into practice Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, forcing Britain to intervene in a Franco-German tussle to uphold Belgium’s neutrality. As neither the Flemings nor Walloons loved Belgium, they left Britain to do the fighting. The war left Britain with 700,000 military deaths.

After the war, the Belgian establishment put Hennebicq’s doctrine into practice. Since 1919, economic and social policies have not been decided in parliament, but between the government and so-called ’social partners’, including the trade unions and the Federation of Belgian Employers.

Soon, the Belgians realised they could apply their ideas to Europe. In the Thirties, Henri De Man, leader of the Belgian Socialist Party, said his country’s ‘corporatist welfare state’ model should be turned into a European or even a global system.

When Hitler overran Europe in 1940, Queen Elisabeth, the widow of Belgium’s King Albert, described it as a ‘work of necessary destruction’.

Meanwhile, De Man saw the Second World War as a unique opportunity to establish a united Europe, asking his followers not to oppose the German victory because: ‘The Socialist Order will thereby be established, as the common good, in the name of a national solidarity that will soon be continental, if not worldwide.’

What was needed, he added, ‘was as much federalism and as little separatism as possible’.

De Man is now forgotten by history. His legacy, however, is very much alive thanks to his deputy, Paul-Henri Spaak, who settled in Britain during the summer of 1940.

He would go on to produce the Spaak Report which laid the foundation of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It recommended the creation of a European Common Market, which would later become the European Union, as a step towards political unification and ‘an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’. From the beginning, what these peoples might think was deemed unimportant.

Today’s EU is a shotgun marriage for the peoples of Europe. When the Danes voted against the Maastricht Treaty, and the Irish against Nice and Lisbon, they had to vote again. When the French and Dutch rejected the EU Constitution, their verdict was discarded.

Britain’s Government simply denied its people a say on the Lisbon Treaty, so Westminster is now legally obliged to ‘contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union’ – i.e. to further the interests of the EU, rather than those of its own people.

Make no mistake, the EU is an empire with global ambitions. In his acceptance speech, President Van Rompuy extolled ‘global governance’.

Legions of bureaucrats will rule the British from Brussels, the Belgian capital. Being proud of your Britishness will be criminalised, just as Brussels has always punished Flemings who put Flanders first.

Last November, Van Rompuy, although a Fleming himself, confessed in an interview: ‘I am a European because the European idea is an antidote for Flemish nationalism, an antivenin [an antitoxin against a snake's venom] against the Flemish Movement.’

Two weeks later, he became the EU President. Van Rompuy is no harmless creature. He symbolises the conquest of Britain by Belgium, the monster created by Palmerston.

• Dr Paul Belien is the Flemish author of A Throne In Brussels: Britain, The Saxe-Coburgs And The Belgianisation Of Europe, published by Imprint Academic, Exeter.

Pope Benedict XVI used his traditional New Year address to call for a revolution in personal lifestyles in order to safeguard the future of the planet.

Telegraph | Jan 1, 2010

By Nick Squires in Rome

Pope Benedict XVI used his traditional New Year address to call for a revolution in personal lifestyles in order to safeguard the future of the planet

He said people needed to change how they live their lives and called for “ecological responsibility” to be taught in schools.

The Pope said individuals and families had as important a role to play in preserving the environment as governments meeting at international summits such as the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen last month.

Related

Pope Benedict XVI urges pilgrims to fight climate change and reject consumerism

He told thousands of faithful who had gathered in St Peter’s Square that environmental responsibility was essential for global peace.

“I would like to underline the importance of the choices of individuals, families and local administrations in preserving the environment.

“An objective shared by all, an indispensable condition for peace, is that of overseeing the earth’s natural resources with justice and wisdom,” he said.

Calling for an end to war and in particular the suffering of children, the 82-year-old, German-born pontiff said there was “a close link” between respect for mankind and respect for nature.

“If humanity shames itself, it damages its environment”, Benedict said.

He appealed for “investment in education with the objective not only to transmit technical and scientific concepts, but also a broader and deeper ‘ecological responsibility’ based on respect for humanity, human rights and fundamental duties”.

The Pope has built on the legacy of his predecessor, John Paul II, in putting the environment high on the Vatican’s agenda.

Last month, in a message sent to heads of state and international organisations, Benedict called on rich nations to acknowledge responsibility for the environmental crisis and to rein in consumerism.

He gave his address a week after a 25-year-old woman with a history of mental problems knocked him to the ground during Christmas Eve mass.

He was unhurt in the fall and has kept up his busy holiday schedule.

Photo: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Book Review:

WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order By Martin Jacques

NY Times | Dec 31, 2009

Waking Dragon

By JOSEPH KAHN

Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.

China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.

Related

New order: A stimulating yet ultimately flawed portrait of a China-dominated world

In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.

This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.

Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”

Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power.

China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.

Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.

Joseph Kahn is a former Beijing bureau chief and now a deputy foreign editor of The Times.

Full Story

US Aids S. Sudan Secession

Washington offers $1 billion in annual aid to South Sudan.

IslamOnline.net | Dec. 25, 2009

"The United States government, one of their goals now, is to make sure southern Sudan in 2011 is a viable state," Gatkuoth said. (Washington Times)

CAIRO — The United States is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the pocket of South Sudan government to help it prepare for secession from the North.

“The United States government, one of their goals now, is to make sure southern Sudan in 2011 is a viable state,” Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, representative of South Sudan in Washington, told The Washington Times Friday, December 25.

Washington offers $1 billion in annual aid to South Sudan.

Related

Washington Assists South Sudan Secession, Admits SPLM

The majority of the money is used to build roads, train police and professionalize a separate army in preparation for the Christian-majority region’s secession in 2011, said Gatkuoth, who also heads South Sudan’s mission to the UN.

Southern Sudanese will vote in a referendum in 2011 on whether to secede from the Muslim north.

The referendum is part of the 2005 north-south peace deal, which ended a two-decade civil war between the north and south.

The accord established an interim period, with a coalition government between the Muslim north and mostly Christian south and the sharing of oil wealth.

Last month, South Sudan President Salva Kiir publicly called for secession from Sudan.

Though southern officials have not concealed their intention to vote for secession, the region still lack the basics of a viable state.

The region is also plagued by tribal clashes, which have killed at least 2,500 people and displaced more than 350,000 others this year.

The International Crisis Group on Tuesday criticized South Sudan police for failing to keep security and end tribal clashes in the region.

War Again

Gatkuoth accused the Khartoum government of stumbling efforts of the South to secede.

“I do not think the North is ready to allow the South to go and have its independent state,” he said.

The southern official said that the next 12 months would be crucial in determining the fate of the country.

“In 2010, we either make it or break it,” he said.

“An election can lead to war if you feel cheated.”

The ruling Sudanese National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) agreed Wednesday to review a disputed law on the 2011 referendum.

Parliament has passed the law even though SPLM walked out of the assembly objecting to an amendment allowing southerners living in the north to vote in the January 2011 referendum.

Gatkuoth threatened that the South will take up arms again if Khartoum government tried to postpone the 2011 referendum.

“Even if you postpone that for one day, the people of southern Sudan will not accept it.”

beaufortobserver.net | Dec 28, 2009

Last week, as the nation’s attention was focused on the Senate’s debate on health care reform, President Barack Obama signed an amendment to Executive Order 12425 . It is only one paragraph long and few would pay much attention to what its effect is. But it has enormous implications.

Here’s the background.

Generally, foreign military and police organizations are restricted from operating in the United States without oversight by the CIA, FBI, Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security or though some other arrangement that makes such operations subject to U. S. authority. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12425 that allowed the International Criminal Organization (INTERPOL) to operate in the United States but generally subject to the same laws that restrict CIA, FBI and other Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. Specifically, INTERPOL agents were not immune from being prosecuted for violating American laws.

One of those laws is 42 U.S.C. § 1983 which prohibits law enforcement authorities from violating an American’s constitutionally protected rights. Presumably, that does not apply to INTERPOL as a result of this Executive Order President Obama has just signed.

Related

Executive Order Amended to Immunize INTERPOL In America – Is The ICC Next?

The effect of Obama’s amendment is to give them immunity violating any American law. Agents of INTERPOL will now presumably have the same protection that foreign diplomats have while in this country. It is that immunity that has been used by other countries to spy on the United States. This arrangement, for example, now would make it possible for an American citizen being seized by INTERPOL agents and taken out of the country outside the reach of American courts and the rights they would enforce, most notably habeas corpus or the right for a judge to review a person’s detention. Likewise, INTERPOL agents could seize property, including firearms, without search warrants and conduct other warrantless searches. They could break into homes and businesses to search and seize records without fear of prosecution, either criminally or civilly. In short, the powers that INTERPOL would have by being immune to U. S. law is virtually the same as martial law provides.

Moreover, INTERPOL’s files and records are immune from U. S. court orders, including search warrants and civil subpoenas. And INTERPOL is protected from Freedom Of Information inquires from American media.

So why would an American president grant such extensive powers to a foreign organization?

And foreign INTERPOL is. It is housed in Lyon, France and is governed by an Executive Committee elected by the 123 member nations though the General Assembly. But that group meets only once a year. The real power is exercised by thirteen members of the Executive Committee. It is headed by KHOO Boon Hui of Singapore. There is not an American on the Executive Committee.

As best we can determine President Obama’s actions have not been reviewed by Congress and certainly have not been debated publically.

London Times | Dec 21, 2009

by Ben Webster, Francis Elliott

A new global body dedicated to environmental stewardship is needed to prevent a repeat of the deadlock which undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit, Gordon Brown will say tomorrow.

The UN’s consensual method of negotiation, which requires all 192 countries to reach agreement, needs to be reformed to ensure that the will of the majority prevails, he feels.

The Prime Minister will say: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries. One of the frustrations for me was the lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship.

“I believe that in 2010 we will need to look at reforming our international institutions to meet the common challenges we face as a global community.” The summit failed to produce a political agreement among all the countries. Delegates instead passed a motion on Saturday “taking note” of an accord drawn up the night before by five countries: the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

Despite being the first world leader to join the summit, Mr Brown was excluded from the key meeting where the compromise was decided.

Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, admitted today that the results of the Copenhagen conference were “disappointing” because of the absence of agreement on emissions targets or a deadline for turning the accord into a legally binding treaty.

Mr Miliband pointed the finger of blame at China for resisting a legal agreement and its rejection of a proposal for 50 per cent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Efforts to give legal force to the commitments in the Copenhagen accord came up against “impossible resistance from a small number of developing countries, including China, who didn’t want a legal agreement”, he said.

Challenged over accusations that the agreement reached in Copenhagen failed to protect poor people in developing countries, Mr Miliband said: “The eventual outcome was disappointing. But the idea that walking away from agreement would have been better for people facing climate change is frankly ridiculous.

“I think we can protect and help those people’s lives and indeed protect them from climate change through this agreement.

“The fact is that we have got fast-start finance of $10 billion a year flowing as a result of this agreement.” He said it was important that countries had agreed for the need to make emissions cuts, even though they had failed to commit to specific targets.

“We won’t know the precise shape of [the national emission targets] until the beginning of February, and we are going to have to push for them to be higher.

“Even though there were things we didn’t achieve, the fact is we have got for the first time developing countries coming together and saying that they are going to reduce emissions, and the finance is flowing.”

Mr Miliband rejected claims that Britain and the European Union were “sidelined” by their absence from a meeting at which President Obama and the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa thrashed out the basic shape of the accord.

“I don’t think that was the meeting that in the end decided the agreement,” he said. “The big decisions took place in a group of about 30 countries in which President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and Gordon Brown were represented.”

In the accord

• Agreement that “deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science”

• “Long co-operative action” needed to keep the global temperature increase below 2C

• Rich countries should submit proposals for economy-wide emission reduction targets for 2020 to the UN by January 31

• By the same date, developing countries should produce plans to cut the rate of growth of their emissions

• There should be international monitoring of any emission cuts in developing countries that are funded by rich countries

• A reassessment of the accord by 2015 to check whether emission reductions are on track to keep the temperature increase below 2C

• Consideration in 2015 of strengthening the goal to 1.5C

Not in the accord

• Emission targets, either for 2020 or 2050

• A date by which global emissions should peak

• Any deadline for turning the accord into a binding treaty

• A commitment on how much of the climate protection funding would be additional to existing overseas aid pledges

• Agreement on an international body to verify the emissions reported by each country

economictimes.indiatimes.com | Dec 20, 2009

LONDON: London to New York by train? Well, it may seem unbelievable, but if Russia’s plans to link Europe and the US by rail materialises, it would fire the imagination of every traveller.

In fact, dreams of travelling from London to New York by train were evoked after the state-run Russian Railways has pledged a crucial tunnel linking the country to North America will be “feasible” in 10 years, the ‘Sunday Express’ reported.

Vladimir Yakunin, the President of Russian Railways and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s close confidant, said that the aim was to connect more than half of the planet by train.

He said American investors had already approached him about boring a 64-mile tunnel under the famous Bering Sea that separates Asia and North America. “We are the promoters of an West-East corridor. There’ll soon be renaissance of railways.”

Though the 9,000-mile train journey could take up to three weeks, it will definitely be one of the world’s most exhilarating trips.

In fact, its crowning glory would be the much longed-for tunnel under the Bering Sea, a project first dreamt up by Tsar Nicholas II a century ago and which would unify the two Cold War enemies at a cost of some 10 billion pounds.

Yakunin said engineers had been looking at the 31-mile Channel Tunnel as the template although the new venture would face far greater challenges including boring through the two islands in the middle of the straits.

He said: “We are very interested in the technology of Channel Tunnel and we are looking at the possibility of a tunnel under the Bering Sea.

“Already some representatives from some funds in the United States have come to me about my ambition to run trains from Russia to the US. We could link up half the world. It’s possible and it may be feasible within 10 years.”

Reuters | Dec 17, 2009

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany plans to send up to 2,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan in response to requests from the United States and other NATO partners, a German newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Citing NATO and German Defence Ministry sources, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the United States and NATO members had already received signals to this effect.

A ministry spokesman declined to confirm the report and referred to the government’s repeated position that no decisions will be made before January’s international conference on Afghanistan in London.

Germany has the third biggest NATO contingent in Afghanistan with close to 4,500 soldiers. Boosting that number would require a new parliamentary mandate but opinion polls show a majority of Germans are against the deployment.

German troops are stationed mostly in northern Afghanistan and Berlin has refused so far to send soldiers to the more dangerous south.

A political row in Berlin over a German-ordered air strike in Afghanistan in September that killed civilians has forced a cabinet minister and the head of the country’s armed forces to resign, making the prospect of boosting troop levels even more sensitive.

AFP | Dec 20, 2009

WASHINGTON — Georgia is dispatching nearly 1,000 troops to Afghanistan as a sign of gratitude towards the west, President Mikheil Saakashvili wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Saturday.

Saakashvili, who is keen for Georgia to join NATO, stressed that Tbilisi was “firmly allied to the values of the US and the trans-Atlantic community.”

Georgia “has been grateful for the extent to which the US and Europe have stood alongside us over recent years. Now we are proud to stand — and fight — alongside you,” he wrote.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization froze its ties with Russia after its conflict with Georgia in August 2008. Ties were restored some four months later.

The troop commitment — a heavy battalion and two light companies — makes this former Soviet republic the largest per capital contributor to the war effort, Saakashvili wrote.

An infantry company of about 170 Georgian troops is already in Afghanistan, serving under French command, and nearly 800 Georgian troops will be deployed with US Marines to Helmand province, Saakashvili said.

Georgia was also a key contributor to US-led forces in Iraq, where 2,000 of its soldiers served near the Iranian border until 2008, the second-largest presence among US allies in Iraq after Britain.

euractiv.com | Dec 17, 2009

An attempt by developing and emerging countries to create “a new world order” in which Western industrialised nations are no longer dominant is threatening to scupper an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen, warned EU delegates. EurActiv reports from the Danish capital.

As more than 130 world leaders arrive in Copenhagen for the final two days of the UN climate conference – US President Barack Obama is due to arrive tomorrow (18 December) – negotiators have warned that the risk of failure has never been higher.

“The final negotiations will be tense and strenuous,” said Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who is chairing the conference after Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard resigned from the role to move the negotiations up a notch.

‘New world order’

Jo Leinen, who leads the European Parliament’s delegation in Copenhagen, told EurActiv that the conference has been rigged with mistrust between rich and poor nations over emissions reduction targets and aid to the developing world (EurActiv 16/12/09).

Leinen’s interpretation of the current state of play is that developing countries were trying to use the conference as a way to force a new world order in which industrialised countries are no longer the dominant power.

“I think we are at the beginning of a new world order,” the MEP said. But he warned that it would be “a pity to sacrifice the climate conference for unsolved global governance problems”.

His alarm was echoed by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said on Wednesday (16 December) that negotiators were set for an “uphill struggle” to bridge the gap in the negotiations. “If you don’t get an agreement this week, people will doubt whether you can get an agreement at all,” Brown told the BBC.

Rich-poor divide

Tensions have tended to concentrate on emissions reduction targets for industrialised countries.

On Monday, the G77-China bloc, encompassing 130 developing and emerging nations, suspended the talks for a few hours in protest against the Danish host government, which they said was favouring the interests of developed countries.

The EU expects other developed nations to make firm commitments on emissions reductions targets in order to raise its own target of reducing greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020 to 30%.

But Jo Leinen, the European Parliament’s negotiator, cautioned that this would be a last-minute decision which now seemed unlikely due to insufficient commitments from other parties.

Killing Kyoto?

The Group of 77 and China yesterday warned against attempts to dismantle the Kyoto Protocol, which binds nearly 40 rich nations to limit carbon emissions.

The United States in particular has never ratified Kyoto due to concerns over the economy.

But developing countries want rich nations to be held to their Kyoto obligations, and sign up to a second round of tougher commitments from 2013.

“We have seen that developed country parties to the Kyoto Protocol are seeking to dismantle the protocol itself,” said NafieAli Nafie, head of the Sudanese delegation, who spoke on behalf of the G77 and China at the high-level segment of the conference.

Industrialised countries are in favour of a “single undertaking” which is much weaker than the protocol and would undermine and reinterpret the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, Nafie said.

He said developed countries intended to undermine the principles of “equity, common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” by throwing away the Kyoto Protocol.

Negotiations to extend the Kyoto pact have stalled, India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh warned on Wednesday. He said many developed countries were “vehemently opposing” the protocol and some of them wanted a single new accord obliging all nations to fight global warming. “The sense we get is that [the] Kyoto [Protocol] is in intensive care if not dead,” Ramesh told reporters.

Two-track approach

But developing countries want to maintain Kyoto as an essential part of the negotiations. “The G77 wishes to stress the need to maintain the two-track outcome of which the Kyoto Protocol is an essential instrument,” Nafie said.

The two-track negotiation mechanism was established in the Bali Action Plan, adopted two years ago. According to the action plan, developed countries should come up with emissions reduction targets for the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol after the first period expires in 2012, and discuss how to help developing countries with their mitigation and adaptation efforts under the UNFCCC.

Jo Leinen MEP, head of the European Parliament’s delegation in Copenhagen, told EurActiv that what he had seen so far “is not very encouraging”. He said he was still hoping that the US, Russia, Canada and Australia would up their offers.

“Without a deal on reduction targets, then probably in this conference there will not be a deal on long-term financing,” Leinen said. He warned that the question of financing now seemed to be pushed back until after Copenhagen, which would signal a failure for the conference.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso was still confident that an ambitious deal with targets “is within our grasp”. “If, as I hope, everybody is now ready to overcome the procedural obstacles, I believe we now have a basis for a real negotiation in the closing days towards a meaningful and ambitious deal, which we must transform into a binding legal agreement next year,” he told the high-level segment in Copenhagen yesterday.

Back from Copenhagen, MEP Lena Ek (Sweden, ALDE) stressed the need for action from all sides. “To reach a deal we need three things above all: China must start reporting; America must start financing; and the EU must be committing to a 30% cut in emissions by 2020. No muss, no fuss – just real action now,” she said.

Green MEP Rebecca Harms (Germany) urged European leaders to realise that there is no longer any time to waste. “Reports that EU is preparing to abandon its 30% reduction target by 2020 are extremely worrying at such a crucial stage in the negotiations. The EU has waved this promise under the noses of all other negotiating parties for two years: to revoke it now could jeopardise the talks irreparably. The EU presidency must drop any draft ‘back-up’ plan that would abandon former promises,” she said.

WWF, the global conservation organisation, warned that there was little substance in the texts that are to be presented to heads of states upon their arrival. “In many ways the final sessions have produced more disagreement rather than less on key issues as national negotiators dig in,” said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF’s global deal. “As the really hard decisions go forward to higher levels, it becomes more likely we will end up with high words on principal and less likely we will get detailed words that will work in tackling climate change.”

Oxfam, the development NGO, called on developed countries to deliver financing, reminding them that poor countries are ready to act on their side. “Like court magicians rich country negotiators are conjuring up a deal for their political masters which provides the illusion of action but delivers next to nothing of substance. Poor countries will not be fooled by spin – as they have already made clear they will not sign a suicide pact in Copenhagen,” said Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International.