Pax Gaea Human Rights World Post

• UN, Lebanon reach Hariri tribunal agreement
• Jamaican diplomat, Global champion for women's equality dies
• Profiting from pandemic: Indonesia refusal to share bird flu virus sparks WHO concerns
• Religious propaganda campaign in Pakistan equates polio vaccine to 'birth control'
• Resolution condemning use of child soldiers signed by 58 countries
• United states refuses to sign treaty banning secret detentions
• Cluster bombs dropped by Israel continue to have devastating consequences in Lebanon
• Rich nations must take lead on curbing global warming, admonishes Brazilian President
• U.S. 'optimistic' about upcoming six-party talks with North Korea

UN signs deal on Hariri court, raising pressure for ratification

Siniora defends letters to world body as government's 'right'

By Rym Ghazal , Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: The United Nations signed the draft for a mixed Lebanese-international tribunal to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Tuesday, one week after the government reportedly requested that the document be sanctioned under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. A UN official speaking on condition of anonymity told The Daily Star that the agreement with the UN to establish the special court had been signed and that it would now be returned to Lebanon for ratification in Parliament. The agreement was signed less than 24 hours after President Emile Lahoud urged the UN to "disregard" letters sent by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora concerning the inability of his government to convene Parliament to vote on the tribunal. A report on Future TV late Tuesday also said the agreement had been signed. "Future TV has learned that the United Nations signed the text of the treaty regarding the international tribunal," the report said. "It also signed the bylaws of the tribunal." On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Lebanese government to ratify the pact as soon as possible. "We hope that once the United Nations signs this document, the Lebanese government will take the necessary measures to ratify this in accordance with their constitutional procedures," Ban said. Daily Star (Lebanon) (2/7)

Angela King, leading advocate for women's equality and top U.N. official on women's advancement, dies

The Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS: Angela E.V. King, a Jamaican diplomat who became a leading advocate for women's equality and the first special adviser to the U.N. secretary-general on women's advancement, has died, the U.N. said Tuesday. King died from complications of breast cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on Monday, her former husband Wilton James said. She was 68 years old. During a 38-year career at the United Nations, King led efforts to end discrimination against women and promote gender equality within the organization and globally. She was also one of a handful of women to lead a U.N. peacebuilding mission — in South Africa from 1992-94 during the country's first democratic, non-racial elections. King participated in U.N. conferences to promote women's rights in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, and Beijing in 1995, where world leaders adopted a wide-ranging blueprint to achieve equality for women.In 1997, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed her to a new post as his special adviser on gender issues and advancement of women with the rank of assistant secretary-general to help ensure U.N.-wide implementation of the Beijing platform. International Herald Tribune (2/7)

Indonesia May Sell, Not Give, Bird Flu Virus to Scientists

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Indonesia, which has had more human cases of avian flu than any other country, has stopped sending samples of the virus to the World Health Organization, apparently because it is negotiating a contract to sell the samples to an American vaccine company, a W.H.O. official said yesterday. The strains of the H5N1 virus circulating in Indonesia are considered crucial to developing up-to-date vaccines and following mutations in the virus. The official, Dr. David L. Heymann, said the agency was “clearly concerned” about the development and was in talks with Indonesia. Dr. Heymann, the agency’s chief of communicable diseases, said he was not blaming the company involved, Baxter Healthcare of Deerfield, Ill. “But now that this has happened,” he said, “we have to sit down and figure out how to rectify it.” Indonesia signed a memorandum of agreement with Baxter today. A Baxter spokeswoman said the company had not asked Indonesia to stop cooperating with the W.H.O. She added that the agreement under negotiation would not give it exclusive access to Indonesian strains. The virus has not yet mutated into a strain easily transmitted among humans. But it has infected 81 people in Indonesia, 63 of them fatally. It killed more people in 2006 than in any previous year and is out of control in poultry in Indonesia, Egypt and West Africa, so experts fear it as much as ever.In addition, Indonesia’s decision upsets the pattern for making seasonal flu vaccines — by choosing among hundreds of samples sent in voluntarily from all over the world — and could set a dangerous example for other countries. Indonesia and other poor countries feel slighted by the system — justifiably so, some experts say — because the samples they send in are used to produce vaccines that they often cannot afford. New York Times (2/7)

PAKISTAN: Fighting disinformation in polio campaign

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

PESHAWAR, 7 Feb 2007 (IRIN) - Two women slip into the polio vaccination centre at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar, a baby hidden in a shawl. The women are scared and seem desperate to leave as soon as possible. “My husband doesn’t know we are here. He does not want his children immunised against polio, because he says this is a western conspiracy to force birth control in a hidden form on people. But I want my son to be safe,” says Ajmeena Khan, 25. She has smuggled her five-month-old son, Ozair, to the vaccination centre with her sister, while her husband is away at the shop he runs in a bazaar in the capital of the Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). “I normally never leave the house without him. He would be furious if he found I had disobeyed him,” Khan explained. NWFP is Pakistan’s most conservative province, and one of the manifestations of a Taliban resurgence has been a rising opposition to anything perceived as ‘western’ in origin – including polio drops. IRIN News (United Nations) (2/7)

58 countries commit to ending use of child soldiers

PARIS — Fifty-eight countries agreed Tuesday to take action to protect children from being recruited as soldiers in wars, joining for the first time an effort that had been largely confined to NGOs. The 58 countries that signed up to the so-called Paris commitments at the end of a two-day conference included 10 of the 12 nations where an estimated 250,000 children bear arms."We commit ourselves to spare no effort to end the unlawful recruitment and use of children by armed forces or groups in all regions of the world," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said at the end of the gathering held in Paris. The document put the onus squarely on governments to prosecute recruiters or commanders of child soldiers and to seek the unconditional release of all children enrolled in armies or armed groups.It also singled out the plight of girls abducted to work as domestic slaves for fighting forces and who are often victims of rape, stating that they deserved special assistance. In some armed groups, girls make up 40% of the children recruited, according to the U.N. Among the signatories to the Paris commitments were Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Uganda, which are all on a U.N. black list of countries that recruit child soldiers.Two others on the U.N. list — Myanmar and the Philippines — did not take part in the conference, which was organized by the U.N. children's agency UNICEF and the French foreign ministry. Ten years after children's' rights campaigner Graca Machel unveiled the Cape Town principles that would guide non-governmental organizations, the Paris commitments were hailed as a key step that would inject new momentum to international efforts to end the use of children in combat. "For the first time, countries are solemnly committing to apply and respect these principles to combat the recruitment and use of children in armed conflicts," a foreign ministry official said. Japan Today (2/7)

U.S. Declines to Join Accord on Secret Detentions

By Molly Moore, Washington Post Foreign Service

PARIS, Feb. 6 -- Representatives from 57 countries on Tuesday signed a long-negotiated treaty prohibiting governments from holding people in secret detention. The United States declined to endorse the document, saying its text did not meet U.S. expectations. Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said the treaty was "a message to all modern-day authorities committed to the fight against terrorism" that some practices are "not acceptable." In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment, except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty but that the final wording "did not meet our expectations." The Associated Press reported that McCormack declined to comment on whether the U.S. stance was influenced by the Bush administration's policy of sending terrorism suspects to CIA-run prisons overseas, which President Bush acknowledged in September. "Our American friends were naturally invited to this ceremony," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said after the signing here. "Unfortunately, they weren't able to join us. That won't prevent them from one day signing on in New York at U.N. headquarters, and I hope they will." Some U.S. allies in Europe also declined to join, among them Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy. The convention defines forced disappearance as the arrest, detention or kidnapping of a person by state agents or affiliates and subsequent denials about the detention or location of the individual. Washington Post (2/6)

Cluster bombs: a war's perilous aftermath

UN figures estimate that 26 percent of south Lebanon's cultivatable land is affected by the ordinance.

By Scott Peterson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

MAARAKEH, LEBANON - Cease-fires end wars. Or so the Zayoun family thought, when Israel and Hizbullah agreed nearly six months ago to stop battling. But instead, this poverty-stricken Lebanese Shiite household found new agony when a remnant of this war was brought into their living room: one Israeli cluster bomblet, out of an estimated 1 million such unexploded munitions that carpet southern Lebanon. The US State Department said last week that Israel "likely could have" misused American-supplied cluster bombs by peppering civilian areas from which, Israel says, Hizbullah was operating. Similar Israeli usage in 1982 led to a six-year ban of US sales of the controversial weapon, though analysts do not expect such a sanction of the US ally today. But as UN-organized demining teams toil across olive groves and tobacco farms to destroy what they call an "unprecedented" concentration of the controversial cluster bombs here, the casualties continue to mount. The Zayoun family alone accounts for three of a postwar Lebanese toll that today stands at 184 wounded and 30 dead. Father Mohammed blames himself for picking up the small metal cylinder and putting it in his bag while cutting thyme in a field that had been marked with red and white warning tape. Just after nightfall, with the house lit only by a few candles, his 4-year-old daughter Aya Zayoun found the cluster bomb in her father's bag outside. She took it inside to the living room and handed it to her older sister, Rasha, who thought it was a toy bell. Then it exploded. Christian Science Monitor (2/7)

Brazil scolds rich on environment

By Emilio San Pedro, BBC News

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has accused developed countries of failing to do enough to fight against global warming. In a speech in Rio de Janeiro, President Lula said it was time for wealthy countries to do more to reduce gas emissions. He called on them to stop preaching on what to do with the Amazon rainforest. President Lula said developed nations applied a double standard in their approach to global warming. The Brazilian president has accused wealthy countries of not doing enough on the environment before, but he has rarely been this direct. He said they were skilful at drafting agreements and protocols, like the Kyoto treaty, to appear as if they were doing something to reverse dangerous gas emissions. In practice, however, he said the results proved otherwise. BBC (2/7)

Envoys optimistic about N. Korea talks

By BURT HERMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BEIJING -- International talks on North Korea's nuclear program convene Thursday with a new sense of optimism about the possibility of the first tangible progress on the communist nation's disarmament since negotiations began more than three years ago.The main U.S. envoy said Wednesday that the first steps on dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear weapons could be agreed upon at this round of meetings in Beijing, though he expected "hard bargaining." Ahead of the six-nation negotiations, the North has also signaled it's satisfied with changes in the United States' attitude, following an apparent greater willingness by all sides to compromise. The latest nuclear standoff with the North started in late 2002 after Washington accused Pyongyang of having a secret uranium enrichment program in violation of a 1994 deal between the two countries. North Korea kicked out nuclear inspectors and restarted its main reactor, moves that culminated in the country's first atomic test detonation in October. Seattle Post-Intelligencer (2/7)

FEMA Wants Over $300M in Katrina Aid Back

By FRANK BASS and MICHELLE ROBERTS,The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS -- In the neighborhood President Bush visited right after Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. government gave $84.5 million to more than 10,000 households. But Census figures show fewer than 8,000 homes existed there at the time. Now the government wants back a lot of the money it disbursed across the region. The Federal Emergency Management Administration has determined nearly 70,000 Louisiana households improperly received $309.1 million in grants, and officials acknowledge those numbers are likely to grow. In the chaotic period after two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, slammed the Gulf Coast in 2005 _ Katrina making landfall in late August, followed by Rita in late September _ federal officials scrambled to provide help in hard-hit areas such as submerged neighborhoods near the French Quarter. But an Associated Press analysis of government data obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act suggests the government might not have been careful enough with its checkbook as it gave out nearly $5.3 billion in aid to storm victims. The analysis found the government regularly gave money to more homes in some neighborhoods than the number of homes that actually existed. The pattern was repeated in nearly 100 neighborhoods damaged by the hurricanes. At least 162,750 homes that didn't exist before the storms may have received a total of more than $1 billion in improper or illegal payments, the AP found. The AP analysis discovered the government made more home grants than the number of homes in one of every five neighborhoods in the wake of Katrina. After Rita roared ashore, there were more home grants than homes in one of every 10 neighborhoods. "We don't dispute that more households received expedited assistance in certain zip codes than are listed in the 2000 Census," said David Garratt, FEMA's deputy director for recovery. But he called this "not only justifiable, it's defensible."Officials say a substantial number of those payments _ they cannot say precisely how many _ were made legitimately to homes where family members were separated after the storm, such as emergency workers who stayed behind as spouses and children fled. In such cases, a single family could qualify for more than one aid package. Garratt said officials were in a no-win position. Washington Post (2/7)