UN summit talks accept key US anti-poverty proposal

By Evelyn Leopold 
September 8, 2005
Reuters
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08287828.htm

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 8 (Reuters) - With little time left before next week's U.N. summit, negotiators accepted a U.S. compromise on development during divisive talks on a document world leaders could support, delegates said on Thursday. 

The Bush administration had wanted to eliminate the phrase Millennium Development Goals,jolting most U.N. members, including allies in the European Union. The words refer to eight objectives on poverty, hunger, primary education, AIDS and others, with targets to be achieved by 2015. 

The new language, tentatively accepted by a negotiating group of 32 ambassadors, would ensure the timely and full realization of the development goals and objectives that emerged from the major United Nations conferences and summits, including those agreed at the Millennium Summit that have been known as the Millennium Development Goals... 

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton submitted the compromise on Tuesday during marathon negotiations after criticism mounted against the U.S. position. 

It's a very good development, said Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram. But he said differences still remained on agreeing a goal for rich nations to pay 0.7 percent of their gross national product for foreign aid. 

The United States, which objects to the goal, pays less than 1 percent of its GNP while the European Union has set a timetable to meet the 0.7 target by 2015. 
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had hoped the summit of 175 world leaders on Sept. 14-16 would map out new approaches to global security, human rights as well as anti-poverty. 

Rich nations were to agree on a development agenda in exchange for support for Western demands on human rights, terrorism, U.N. management reforms and the responsibility for governments to protect civilians facing war crimes and genocide. 
U.N. internal reforms received a boost from a blistering report on Wednesday on mismanagement and corruption in the Iraqi oil-for-food program from an independent panel established by Annan. 

The new proposals include giving the secretary-general more power to move staff around, hire outside financial experts, among others. Yet several developing countries still object to relinquishing any power now held by the 191-member General Assembly, where they have a majority. 

Former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, part of a high-level panel that drafted a report on the summit for Annan last year, told a news conference he was shocked by the condition of the negotiations. 

Evans, head of the International Crisis Group research body, predicted a cry of pain around the world that we will get something out of this rather than just at best a collection of pious generalizations which at the moment seems to be the most optimal outcome that we can hope for.