Hold the Rich Accountable in New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs | Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 23 2015 (IPS) - When the World Economic Forum (WEF) met last January in Switzerland, attended mostly by the rich and the super-rich, the London-based charity Oxfam unveiled a report with an alarming statistic: if current trends continue, the world’s richest one percent would own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016.

And just 80 of the world’s richest will control as much wealth as 3.5 billion people: half the world’s population.

So, when the World Social Forum (WSF), created in response to WEF, holds its annual meeting in Tunis later this week, the primary focus will be on the growing inequalities in present day society.

The Civil Society Reflection Group (CSRG) on Global Development Perspectives will be releasing a new study which calls for both goals and commitments – this time particularly by the rich – if the U.N.’s 17 proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 development agenda are to succeed.

Asked if the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which will reach their targeted deadlines in December, had spelled out goals for the rich, Jens Martens, director of the Global Policy Forum in Bonn, told IPS MDG 8 on global partnership for development was indeed a goal for the rich.

“But this goal remained vague and did not include any binding commitments for rich countries,” he pointed out.

This is the reason why the proposed SDG 17 aims to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development, he added.

In addition, Martens said, governments agreed to include targets on the means of implementation under each of the remaining 16 SDGs. However, many of these targets, again, are not “smart”, i.e. neither specific nor measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

“What we need are ‘smart’ targets to hold rich countries accountable,” he added.

Complete story at - Hold the Rich Accountable in New U.N. Development Goals, Say NGOs | Inter Press Service


A man lives in the makeshift house behind him in the Slovak Republic, a member of the EU. Photo: Mano Strauch © The World Bank

Did The UN Just Pass The Global Patriot Act? | Think Tank

Land Destroyer: From Ukraine to Syria: UN's Selective Defense of Human Rights

October 5, 2014 (Ulson Gunnar - NEO) - For the past several years, the United Nations has served as a platform for Syria's enemies to air allegations of human rights abuses and even attempts to use such allegations to justify military aggression against Syria itself. Tales of "barrel bombs" being used against civilians, the bombardment of enemy positions at the cost of civilian lives and the destruction of vital infrastructure have all been constructs in the West's narrative against the Syrian government.

Now that the US is itself bombing Syria, killing Syrians including innocent men, women and children, as well as vital infrastructure local populations depend on for their survival, the UN has grown suddenly quiet. The Western press too seems to have reverted to its observance of the notion of "collateral damage." Suddenly, the very terrorists the Syrian government has tried to warn the world about for years as it fought them in its city streets and countrysides, are now bad enough for the end of defeating them to justify the means of occasionally killing civilians, so long as they are killed with US rather than Syrian weapons.

The startling hypocrisy combines with the fact that Syria's military is operating within its territory, conducting security operations to secure its own borders and all territory within it, while the US is operating thousands of miles from its own shores, in a foreign country, with both a doubtful pretext and an even more doubtful agenda in mind as it does so.

Where is the United Nations? The airstrikes in Syria carried out by the US, Persian Gulf states, and several European nations are done so without the Syrian government's approval, no recognized opposition party has approved of them, and certainly no UN resolution has provided the West with a mandate to exercise military force inside of Syria. On this point alone, the UN should be standing up in vocal protest, leveling sanctions against those participating in this act of unilateral, illegal military aggression. Additionally, the UN should be speaking out against the loss of civilian lives, just as it did during the past several years of chaos in Syria's ongoing conflict, as well as preparing monitoring teams and investigations into the impact of these attacks.

Complete story at - Land Destroyer: From Ukraine to Syria: UN's Selective Defense of Human Rights