PEOPLES DAILY, tuesday, december 4, 2018
Page 22
world news
N international_peoplesdailyng@yahoo.com
China Supports Reform of WTO
By Zhou Pingjian
T
he rules-based multilateral trading system, with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its core, is now challenged by unilateralism and trade protectionism. Three factors threaten the WTO. One, the dispute settlement regime is at risk of paralysis by obstruction from certain members and as the vacancy of its Appellate Body members cannot be filled. Second, certain members raising tariffs by abusing the security exception clause. Third, some members taking unilateral approaches in disregard of the WTO’s multilateral rules. The world today is undergoing major development, transformation and change. While economic globalization surges forward, global growth is shadowed by protectionism and unilateralism which have become stumbling blocks preventing the relevant WTO mechanisms from performing their roles. China supports necessary reform of the WTO, in order to strengthen its authority and efficacy, to build an open economy, and pursue a community with a shared future for mankind. To this end, the Chinese government published the “China’s Position Paper on WTO reform” On November 23. According to the position paper, the WTO reform should follow three fundamental principles, namely, to preserve the organization’s core values including nondiscrimination and openness, to safeguard development interests of developing members and address their difficulties in integrating into economic globalization, and, to follow the practice of decision-making by consensus. The position paper also put forward five suggestions. Firstly, the WTO reform should uphold the primacy of the multilateral trading system. Some members are trying to introduce “new concepts” or “new terminologies” into the reform agenda, which could undermine the authority of multilateral trading system in a disguised way. China firmly opposes these attempts. The reform should reinforce the centrality of the multilateral trading system in international trade liberalization and facilitation. Secondly, the priority of the reform is to address the
Dr. Zhou Pingjian existential crisis/problems faced by the WTO. The reform should take up and resolve the issue of Appellate Body member appointment blockage as soon as possible and rein in actions of unilateralism and protectionism with the strings of the WTO rules so as to ensure the smooth
functioning of the WTO. Thirdly, the reform should address the imbalance of trade rules and respond to the latest developments of our time. The reform should rectify the severe long-term distortion of international trading of farm products caused by the excessive agricultural subsidies from developed members. The reform should prevent abuse of trade remedy measures especially the “surrogate country” methodology in anti-dumping investigations. Fourthly, the reform should safeguard the special and differential treatment for developing members. China is the largest developing country in the world and is willing to take up commitments commensurate with its level of development and economic capability. However, China will never agree to be deprived of its entitlement to special and deferential treatment as a developing member. Last but not least, the reform should respect the development model of each member. Discrimination against enterprises of certain members in investment security review and anti-trust investigations should be prohibited. The reform should address the abuse by developed members of export control measure in obstructing technology cooperation. China opposes special and discriminatory disciplines against SOEs in the name of WTO reform, and the inclusion of issues based on groundless accusations in the WTO reform agenda. The WTO reform has a bearing on the vital interests and development space of developing countries. China’s position paper fully reflects China’s constructive manner as the largest developing country and a major responsible country. Africa is the continent with most developing countries and Nigeria is the largest developing country in Africa. It is in our mutual interest to speak with one voice and jointly guide the development of the WTO reform process in the right direction. China is willing to work together with Nigeria and Africa to uphold the multilateral trading system and oppose acts of unilateralism in a bid to support common development. (Dr. Zhou Pingjian is Ambassador of China to Nigeria)
Sir David Attenborough: Climate change ‘our greatest threat’
T
he naturalist Sir David Attenborough has said climate change is humanity’s greatest threat in thousands of years. The broadcaster said it could lead to the collapse of civilisations and the extinction of “much of the natural world”. He was speaking at the opening ceremony of United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Katowice, Poland. The meeting is the most critical on climate change since the 2015 Paris agreement. Sir David said: “Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale. Our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” The naturalist is taking up the “People’s Seat” at the conference, called COP24. He is supposed to act as a link between the public and policy-makers at the meeting. “The world’s people have spoken. Their message is clear. Time is running out. They want you, the decision-makers, to act now,” he said. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said climate change was already “a matter of life and death” for many countries. But the UN Secretary-General said the conference was an effort to “right the ship” and he would convene a climate summit next year to discuss next steps.
Meanwhile, the World Bank has announced $200bn in funding over five years to support countries taking action against climate change. What’s so different about this meeting? This Conference of the Parties (COP) is the first to be held since the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C came out in October. The IPCC stated that to keep to the 1.5C goal, governments would have to slash emissions of greenhouse gases by 45% by 2030. But a recent study showed that CO2 emissions are on the rise again after stalling for four years. So urgent is the task that some negotiators began their meetings on Sunday, a day before the official start. Will global leaders be attending? Yes, some 29 heads of state and government are due to give statements at the opening of the meeting. The number is way down on the stellar cast that turned up in Paris in 2015, which perhaps indicates that many are seeing this as more a technical stage on the road to tackling climate change than a big bang moment. But for the likes of China and the EU, the meeting is critical. They will want to show that international co-operation can still work even in the age of President Trump. So will cutting carbon be the main focus of the meeting?
Rather than spending all their time working on how to increase ambitions to cut carbon, conference delegates are likely to focus on trying to finalise the technical rules of how the Paris agreement will work. While the agreement was ratified in record time by more than 180 countries in 2016, it doesn’t become operational until 2020. “It’s no surprise, as agreeing the Paris rules is both technically and politically a complicated task - but it is worth it!” Right now, that rule book runs to several hundred pages with thousands of brackets, indicating areas of dispute. But what about limiting emissions? Under the Paris agreement, each country decides for itself the actions it will take when it comes to cutting carbon. Some observers believe that the changed mood and the urgency of the science will prompt action. “We are hoping that at COP24, countries will make declarations of how they will raise their ambitions by 2020. This is a very important moment,” said Fernanda Carvalho with campaign group WWF. “Governments across the world have completely failed to protect their citizens,” said a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, the social movement that pushes for radical change on climate issues. “Instead, they have pursued quick profit and big business. We need this to change. At COP24, we want to ensure that the focus is not just on getting the technical Paris rulebook as
PEOPLES DAILY, tuesday, december 4, 2018
robust as possible, but also that governments do not lose sight of the bigger picture.” Others involved in the UN process say that real progress is being made in tackling one of the most complex problems ever faced by the world. “We have a $300bn renewable energy economy at work today - it’s not peanuts; it’s an energy revolution that has unfolded on the back of, yes, a sometimes sticky climate negotiation process,” said Achim Steiner, who heads the United Nations Development Programme. How much of a role will money play in making progress in Poland? Many developing countries see progress on issues around finance to be critical to moving forward. They have been promised $100bn every year from 2020 as part of the Paris agreement. Some are sceptical about what they see as foot-dragging and obfuscation by richer countries when it comes to handing over the cash. Negotiators say that moving forward on finance is the lynchpin of progress in this meeting. “A key finding of the recent IPCC report, and one that has often been overlooked, is that without a dramatic increase in the provision of climate finance, the possibility of limiting warming to 2C (to say nothing of the safer 1.5C goal) will irretrievably slip away,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. Source: BBC
e w s
Samsung Nigeria tweets update using Apple iPhone
S
amsung Mobile’s promotional Twitter account in Nigeria has been caught sending updates about the Korean firm’s phones via an Apple iPhone. YouTuber Marques Brownlee spotted the mistake and shared an image of a tweet sent out using the iPhone Twitter app. A separate analysis suggested that more than 300 of its tweets had been sent via the same mobile app. The @SamsungMobileNG account was shut down and deleted soon after news of the mistake started to spread. The offending tweet was being used to promote the organic LED display of the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. The gaffe was revealed by the tweet bearing the words “via Twitter for iPhone” in its bottom right-hand corner. Twitter analyst Luca Hammer trawled through 3,200 tweets sent by the Nigeria account and found that more than 10% (331) bore the same revealing message. The Samsung Nigeria account has now been reinstated, but the offending tweets have been removed from its historical feed. This is not the first time Mr Brownlee has noticed one firm’s products being promoted via those of its rivals. In September, Mr Brownlee noticed that Bollywood actress Anushka Sharma, who was paid by Google to promote its Pixel 2 phone, sent the tweets via an iPhone app. Other celebrities using iPhones to promote Samsung’s gadgets include actress Gal Gadot and Indian tennis star Sania Mirza. The most infamous example of this practice took place in Russia when Samsung brand ambassador Ksenia Sobchak was photographed in public and on TV using an Apple iPhone X. Samsung sued her for $1.6m (£1.26m) claiming breach of contract. Source: BBC
F
r o m
Page 23
A
f r i c a
Photographer wins award for project on Rwandan genocide and mental health
C
hrystal Ding, (above), is the third winner of the Rebecca Vassie Memorial Award, which was set up to honour the late photojournalist. The award was set up in 2016 to help early-to-mid career photographers, funding a project which “focuses on human stories with a social or political context”. Ms Ding won the £2,000 prize for her proposal to create portraits of survivors of the
Rwandan genocide, as well as their therapists, along with commentary in the form of letters from survivors to the people supporting them. During 100 days in 1994, Hutu extremists killed about 800,000 people, as they set out to exterminate Rwanda’s minority Tutsi community - as well as their political opponents, irrespective of ethnic origin. The title of Ms Ding’s winning project is Attention Must Be
A photographer has won an award for her proposal to document survivors of the Rwanda genocide who are receiving therapy.
Paid (taken from the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller). The photographer believes that society must pay attention to those who suffer, and also to the healing qualities of the attention received in therapy. Ms Ding describes the project as a “personal and challenging” endeavour. She will work with charities supporting recovery programmes for Rwandans who were in their infancy during the genocide. “I can’t wait to get
started,” she said. Her proposal mirrors another project by Ms Ding which reflects her own experience of therapy, as seen in an image below entitled Dear Mum. Ms Ding studied photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication, and was awarded the bursary partly on the strength of her previous portrait work, (below).
Lucas, from Chrystal Ding’s project Genetopia Image copyright Chrystal
Windrush: Home Office criticised after deportees not contacted Campaigners have accused the Home Office of a lack of “decency” after it emerged dozens of people deported to Commonwealth countries have not been contacted by the Windrush task force. Ministers said “no specific attempt” had been made to approach 49 people deported to Ghana and Nigeria in 2017. The Home Office says it is up to Commonwealth citizens to seek information about their status. MPs said it showed the government had learned nothing from the scandal. The Windrush scandal was uncovered earlier this year, after many people from Commonwealth countries who had legally lived in Britain for decades were wrongly classed as illegal immigrants and deported. They had been encouraged by the UK government to settle in Britain from the late 1940s until 1973. However, although they had been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, some immigrants did not have formal paperwork confirming their residency status. It meant when the Home Office embarked on its so-called “hostile environment” policy designed to make staying in the UK more difficult, some Commonwealth immigrants were wrongly deported. Their problems were compounded by a Home Office
decision, in 2010, to destroy their landing cards - often the only record of their immigration status. Following a public outcry, the government set up a task force to help people formalise their right to remain in the UK. Thousands of people have now contacted the task force and received documents confirming their right to stay in Britain. However, following parliamentary questions from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, Home Office ministers now admit there are 49 people who have still not been informed by the government that the task force exists. The 49 were deported to Ghana and Nigeria between March and September 2017 - before the Windrush scandal erupted. Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said: “If the Home Office has the capacity to deny somebody their rights, to separate them from their loved ones and remove them from the country, surely it has the capacity to find them, to apologise and to help them come home. “But this isn’t a question of capacity alone, it’s a question of decency, and yet another example of a department going out of its way to avoid doing the right thing. “As a country surely we can do so much better than this.” Campaigner Zita Holbourne,
Caroline Nokes, immigration minister, said deportees can ring the Windrush helpline or visit the government website Shadow home secretary Diane who founded anti-austerity organisation Black Activists Abbott said this most recent Rising Against Cuts and is the case showed how “reckless and vice president of trade union PCS, incompetent” the Home Office’s immigration policy was. called it “a disgrace”. “People from almost every ‘Reckless and incompetent’ Ms Lucas, who is MP for Commonwealth country have treated badly under Brighton Pavilion, said: “It been Government’s hostile doesn’t seem much to ask for the this government to tell people they’ve environment,” she said. “It’s clear kicked out of the country that the these injustices will continue if ministers don’t even know what’s Windrush task force exists. “Ministers know their going on.” Liberal Democrat home affairs treatment of the Windrush generation is a national disgrace. spokesman Ed Davey said anyone That they haven’t bothered to who may have been wrongly contact people who’ve been deported should be contacted and deported suggests the government told how to apply to return and hasn’t learned anything from receive compensation. “In these cases, the Home the public backlash against their Office seems to be waiting around hostile environment.”
for people to contact them - even though they may not have the means or information to do so. That’s an utter disgrace.” Home Office minister Ms Nokes, in her written ministerial answer to Ms Lucas’ question, said: “The Home Office has not made a specific attempt to inform those 49 people of the Windrush taskforce. “The Home Office announcements relating to Commonwealth citizens can be found at www.gov.uk/windrush. “This website is regularly updated with information about how individuals who believe they qualify under the Windrush criteria can apply for status under the Windrush Settlement Scheme. “Assistance is also available through the Windrush Taskforce helpline on freephone 0800678 1925 or by email at commonwealthtaskforce@ homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.” A Home Office spokesman said: “Any individual who believes they are protected under the provisions of the 1971 Immigration Act is able to contact the Windrush Taskforce, who will help to identify their current status. “We have always been clear that the Windrush Scheme is not restricted to the Windrush generation or people from the Caribbean, but it is right that applicants for citizenship need to satisfy the good character and residence requirements.”