Brazil’s Santos Cruz to head UN’s DR Congo mission

BBC, 04/25/2013

The UN has appointed a Brazilian general credited with bringing a Haiti slum under control to lead peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Gen Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz will lead 20,000 troops, including a new combat force charged with targeting rebels in the east of the country.

This is the most offensive mandate given to any UN peacekeeping force.

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Brazil seeking UN help in World Cup preparations

Yahoo Sports/Associated Press, 03/21/2013

World Cup organizers in Brazil say they have signed a $17 million deal with the United Nations to help host the tournament.

Claudio Monteiro, the head of World Cup preparations in Brasilia, says the capital’s organizing committee signed the deal with the U.N. Development Program this week.

The U.N. will provide temporary structures outside the stadium to house support services and provide some security services.

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Brazil: states should act on killings by police

Human Rights Watch, 11/29/2012

A resolution by Brazil’s Human Rights Defense Council outlines crucial steps needed to reduce unlawful killings by police, Human Rights Watch said today. The resolution calls on law enforcement officials at the state level to ensure that all killings by their police forces are properly investigated.

The council, led by Human Rights Minister Maria do Rosário, issued the resolution on November 28, 2012, following a public consultation with government officials, public security experts, and civil society representatives.

“Police officers in many parts of Brazil face real difficulties and dangers when confronting violent crime, and many of them have lost their lives in the line of duty,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Unfortunately, their legitimate efforts to enforce the law have often been undermined by other officers who themselves engage in unlawful violence, executing people and falsely claiming their victims died in shootouts.”

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Brazil’s Rousseff criticizes rich countries at UN

Reuters, 09/25/2012

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff harshly criticized the economic policies of rich nations at the United Nations on Tuesday, saying they were failing to end the global crisis and harming emerging markets such as hers.

Rousseff told the U.N. General Assembly that orthodox fiscal policy “has been worsening the recession in the developed economies, with repercussions for the emerging countries.”

Rousseff said that expansionist monetary policy practiced by the United States and Europe had caused “imbalances” in exchange rates of developing nations such as her own. That makes Brazil’s exports less competitive, she said, forcing it to take other measures to protect its industries.

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Brazil gives rice for climate-hit

The Daily Star, 8/16/2012

Brazil donated 7,000 tonnes of rice worth US$ 3.3 million to Bangladesh to help climate vulnerable people cope with the adverse impacts of natural disasters and climate change.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in collaboration with the government will distribute the rice among some 400,000 climate vulnerable Bangladeshis to prepare for and cope with the impact of natural disasters and climate change, said a WFP release on Thursday.

The ultra-poor in the country will participate in communal infrastructure projects and training schemes in coastal and flood-prone areas. These projects are part of WFP’s Enhancing Resilience (ER) to Disaster and the Effects of Climate Change Programme, which aims to build the resilience of food-insecure households against the effects of extreme natural hazards and climate change.

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Ecuador, Brazil to help set up Haiti new military

Chicago Tribune/Reuters, 07/30/2012

Brazil and Ecuador have agreed to help Haiti set up a new army that will eventually replace the U.N. peacekeeping force that has protected the impoverished Caribbean nation on and off since 1994, officials say.

Haiti’s President Michel Martelly has been pushing the idea of reconstituting the army for almost a year, saying Haitians would prefer to have their country protected by its own troops rather than United Nations soldiers deployed in Haiti.

Brazil’s Defense Ministry confirmed it was prepared to help Haiti in everything it needs to restore its army, including military training and engineering. Ecuador has also pledged its support, a defense ministry official said.

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Rio+20: reasons to be cheerful

John Vidal- The Guardian, 6/27/2012

Read the post mortems and commentaries from Rio+20, and you’d think a global disaster had taken place. The UN multilateral system is said to be in crisis, the environment is falling off the edge, and every blade of grass and hillside is for sale. Pundits and NGOs scream that it was “the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war”, “a bleak day, a disastrous meeting” and “a massive waste of time and money”.

Perspective, please. Reaction after the 1992 Rio summit was uncannily similar. Countries passed then what now seem far-sighted treaties and embedded a slew of aspirations and commitments into international documents – but NGOs and journalists were still distraught. They said the climate change agreement was too weak, that sustainable development was too abstract a concept, that the promised aid was inadequate, and that the US had guaranteed the felling of the Amazon forest by refusing to sign the biodiversity convention. There were, they said, no agreements on population growth or subsidies, or oceans, or trade, or women’s rights … and myriad other issues. In short, just like Rio 2012, the meeting was said to be a dismal failure of governments to co-operate.

I was pretty downhearted then, too. So when I returned I went to see Richard Sandbrook, a legendary environmental activist who co-founded Friends of the Earth, directed the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and profoundly influenced a generation of governments, business leaders and NGOs before he died in 2005. Sandbrook made the point (I paraphrase) that NGOs always scream murder because it is their job to push governments, that pundits exaggerate because they are controversialists, and that UN conferences must disappoint because all views have to be accommodated.

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Rio+20: Prince Charles sends warning to Earth summit

The Guardian, 6/18/2012

In a prerecorded speech to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference today, the Prince of Wales warned of the potentially “catastrophic” consequences of inaction on issues such as climate change and global food security.

In the video address, Charles said: “I have watched in despair at how slow progress has sometimes been and how the outright, sceptical reluctance by some to engage with the critical issues of our day have often slowed that progress to a standstill.

“As I speak, the world’s rainforests continue to be destroyed, wiping out so much of the world’s vital biodiversity and removing our chances of storing carbon naturally.

“And we continue to ignore the painful lessons of the so-called green revolution in India by intensifying our food production methods in such blinkered, chemically and technologically-based ways, that the land and the oceans are now both beginning to fail.”

He added: “Already levels of CO2 have exceeded 400 parts per million. 450 parts per million is the tipping point we have to avoid so every day of delay threatens to make the change more dramatic.”

He added that scientific evidence shows the potential consequences and warned we can no longer ignore the risk.

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Rio+20: Sustainable development needs women’s empowerment, UN official says

United Nations – 6/18/2012

Sustainable development will not be achieved without empowering women, the head of the United Nations agency tasked with advancing gender equality said today, adding that the importance of their participation must be reflected in all aspects of the outcome document of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20).“We cannot afford to leave women marginalized,” the Executive Director of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), Michelle Bachelet, told reporters today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “This is not sustainable. This social exclusion of women is not only hurting women, it is hurting all of us.”

On Friday, the responsibility for the negotiations on the outcome document was handed over to the Brazilian Government, which holds the Presidency of Rio+20. The South American nation has since presented a shorter consolidated text for countries to work on, and indicated that the consultation process on the document is expected to conclude on 18 June. It will then be put forward for adoption by Member States, when they meet from 20 to 22 June.

In her comments, Ms. Bachelet said that the outcome document must highlight women’s roles throughout the entire text, as their participation permeates all aspects of sustainable development, including agriculture, education, environmental management and decision-making, among others.

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Politicians can’t save the environment

Peter Bjerregaard – Huffington Post, 6/19/2012

The Rio+20 summit will accentuate the management crisis that characterizes international environmental corporation. Politicians probably won’t agree on anything substantial. Instead, new networks — spearheaded by companies, NGOs and cities — will set the agenda for the future.

“This is no way to run a planet,” wrote Todd Stern, American chief negotiator on climate change in a letter to former President Georg W. Bush in 2007, and stressed that just like you can’t run a company through large plenary sessions with shareholders, you can’t solve global challenges by inviting roughly 200 countries to conferences with extensive agendas. But that’s exactly what’s happening in Rio at the moment.

The Rio+20 conference marks the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit on Sustainable Development held in Rio in 1992. The summit attracted momentous media attention and resulted in a number of international conventions on sustainability, biodiversity and climate. But what has happened with these objectives? According to the newly published U.N. report, Global Environment Outlook, there has been progress in only a handful of nearly 90 indicators. Access to clean water has improved, investments in renewable energy have increased and the ozone layer getting better — but then the stream of good news stops. On almost all other areas the picture look bleak. CO2 has risen by 40 percent, biodiversity in the tropics has decreased by 30 percent, etc.

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