Tag Archives: un

Ireland at the UN table – An authority in soft power

In the world of international diplomacy, something remarkable happened this week to boost the morale of the UK’s closest neighbour, Ireland. She was elected on the first count to the table of the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member, beating the far bigger power of Canada in the process.

You might wonder why Ireland would even want to be there, or why in fact, others would want her to be there. In the short history of the recent state that is Ireland, it will be the fourth time that Ireland has taken its place at that table. An impressive statistic given it’s just a small island in the North Atlantic. To answer this question, you need to get right into the soul of the Irish people to understand why being at the centre of shaping global decision-making and politics is important.

There’s a sense of national pride attached to it – Ireland, the underdog, holding its own amongst the big guns of global politics. More importantly, the island of Ireland has known its own troubles and has overcome them. We understand what feeling oppressed is like. We understand how hard peace is to come by. We understand the importance of language and identity. We understand conflict resolution. We lived it, and if we can come out of it the other side, so can others. 

Let’s look at the result of the count this week. The quota was 128 out of 192 votes. There were three countries up for election – Canada, Norway and Ireland. One the first count, both Norway and Ireland were elected leaving Canada bruised again failing for the second time in recent times to get elected. Two features appeared in the vote – small nations voted for Ireland as well as all the Middle East Arab countries. A vote for Ireland was a vote for the small nations in the UN. Equally, Ireland doesn’t bring baggage to the UN Security Council as it does not have a colonial past and is deemed an honest broker.

The agenda Dublin will be focused on includes supporting a rules-based order that helps to enable small nations to survive. Plus, it intends to lobby for action to be taken against Israel if the planned annexation of the West Bank goes ahead. Ireland regards annexation as a blatant breach of international law. As an honest broker, Ireland is much respected in this regard and has been an active participant in the UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) since 1958. UNTSO, established in 1948, is the oldest ongoing United Nations peacekeeping operation. It operates in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel – the parties to the Truce Agreements that followed the fighting in Palestine in 1948. To date, Ireland still maintains troops in the Golan Heights and Lebanon. 

Posted in Europe / International and Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 9 Comments

LibLink: Paddy Ashdown: Diplomacy, not bombs will defeat ISIS. The west is being sucked into a sectarian conflict

So, David Cameron, like Tony Blair before him, pledges to help the US in the Middle East. We know that that sort of intervention is unlikely to end well. It would also be unlikely that the UN would ever agree to sanction any military action. Russia and China would just block it. So the option would be to have another Iraq, without properly defined objectives and potentially make a horrendous situation even worse.

I don’t always agree with Paddy, but he’s always my first port of call on foreign affairs. He’s been writing for the Independent about what should happen next and what is the best way to tackle the growing ISIS problem. And if you are under any illusion about life under ISIS, have a look at how they treat women and gay people.

Paddy reckons we’ve been too careless, too quick to grab the guns instead of quietly building international coalitions to tackle the major problems faced in the region.

Posted in LibLink | Also tagged , and | 20 Comments

Ed Davey MP writes…Tackling climate change

Flooding in Cedar Rapids, IAI’m writing from the Climate Change Summit in New York, hosted by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. While Liberal Democrats don’t need reminding just how much of a threat climate change is – from the increased risks of flooding, to the impact on the world’s poorest – I thought it timely to give you an update on the progress we’ve made and what comes next.

Posted in News | Also tagged and | 28 Comments

In Full: Nick Clegg’s speech to the UN

Nick Clegg has been doing all sorts of good things at the UN General Assembly in New York this week. Last night it struck me that when I was my daughter’s age, the men with all the power in the world were incredibly scary. There was Reagan with his talk of star wars and neutron bombs and stern-faced Soviet leaders. I feel a lot safer in a world where Nick Clegg’s and Barack Obama’s ideas have some influence. Yes, I know Obama isn’t perfect, but he’s light years from the Cold War attitudes I grew up with.

Here, in full, is

Posted in Europe / International and News | Also tagged and | 4 Comments

Opinion: Raise your hand on Malala Day

Just under a year ago, I wrote a piece about the shooting of a girl who dared to demand her right an education. Today, that girl will address the UN and meet Ban Ki Moon to discuss access to education worldwide. Today is Malala Yousafzai’s 16th birthday.

Education is a right that we often take for granted in the UK. But millions of children worldwide miss out on an education. Where parents cannot afford to send their children to school, cannot afford for their children not to work, or even when places are provided but they cannot provide the uniform or materials, those children will never have the opportunity to change their lives. They will live and die in poverty.

Girls are more likely to miss out on education than boys. When finances are tight, many families will choose to educate sons but not daughters; sons will go on to work, but if daughters are expected to raise a family and stay at home then educating them is seen as pointless. Often, raising children is something done at school age– in sub-Saharan Africa, 1 in 5 girls is married before the age of 18. Once they are married, they will not return to school as this video shows.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | Leave a comment

Hussein-Ece and Brinton on stalking, under-representation of women and gender-based violence

November 25th saw the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. This occasion was marked by a debate in the House of Lords last Thursday.

Just reading the Hansard account of the debate made me feel sick. There was a former surgeon describe the hours of surgery it took to reconstruct one woman’s face after a violent attack by her partner. There were descriptions of how girls as young as 12 were subjected to Female Genital Mutilation in this country despite laws against it. Where is the worst place in the world to be a woman? Reputedly …

Posted in News and Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 2 Comments

LibLink: Jeremy Browne MP on the Government’s actions to prevent torture

Liberal Democrat Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne  in the Guardian about the Coalition’s strategy to prevent torture throughout the World and about the independent enquiry which will investigate whether Britain was implicated in torture after 9/11:

We know that we face a long and difficult road ahead. But our vision is for people to be treated fairly and able to speak freely in every country. We should never be comfortable with a world where journalists, lawyers and activists endure ill treatment for criticising their governments. This is a core part of what this coalition stands for, and we will continue to

Posted in Europe / International, LibLink and News | Also tagged , , and | 2 Comments

The Independent View: The Liberal Democrats’ chance to tackle global poverty

Nick Clegg was not around for the whole of the Lib Dem conference this year. After giving his keynote address he got on a plane and flew to New York, as the UK’s most senior representative to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Review Summit.

The MDGs were agreed in 2000, and signed by world leaders from 189 nations, pledging to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

However, a decade later the MDGs are badly off-track. The MDGs Review Summit is a chance to accelerate progress and keep the promise to the world’s poor.

Nick Clegg made his first UK public speech on international development on 15th September, explaining how the UK Government will meet its commitments to the Millennium Development Goals. He was presented with a giant suitcase, representing the hopes of the 1.3 million people across the UK who have taken part in campaigns for the MDGs over the last year.

The weekend before the MDGs Review Summit began, 1,324 campaign actions took place in 74 countries, calling for a breakthrough plan to meet the MDGs. In the UK, campaigners from the Bond network of NGOs gathered with drums, bells, whistles, pots and pans outside the House of Commons. The message, clearly expressed on banners and in chants was clear: Keep your promises: Deliver the MDGs.

The Millennium Development Goals are clear, measurable, and achievable. They are the best articulation of what progress on tackling global poverty might look like. Delivering them will involve supporting civil society in poor countries, maintaining aid levels, stopping climate change and reforming the international financial institutions that too often harm poor countries instead of helping them.

Nick Clegg has reaffirmed his commitment to the MDGs to NGOs, to party activists, and to countries of the world at the UN.

As the below video shows – people in the UK have consistently shown their support for government action on development. With five years to go until the 2015 deadline, the Liberal Democrats are well placed to make sure the UK’s part of the deal is kept.

Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged | Leave a comment

Jo Swinson’s video from the UN

Last Saturday at the Bloggers’ Unconference, our final interview of the day was with Jo Swinson MP – which was particularly kind of her, since she’d flown back from New York the day before, and must have been jet-lagged.

Falling at the end of the day, the discussion we had with Jo was one of the most informal of the day, but was all the better for that. Her enthusiasm for finding new ways of communicating really shone through, and she talked to us about creating the video below. In particular, she was really keen to show us her new Flip video camera, which is extremely portable and can be used by just the one person, without needing fancy lights, an off-camera microphone or an extra person working as camera operator.

Jo used her Flip to make a series of mini videos about the work she was doing at the UN, and quite simply to give some basic impressions of what visiting the UN buildings in New York are like. The buildings are iconic, but not particularly fancy. Working in the main office block is like working in any slightly old fashioned tower block. She also takes time out of her schedule to show us a moving statue rescued from the rubble of Hiroshima – on the face, undamaged and intact; on the rear, scraped raw by the heat and debris of the nuclear explosion.

If you follow LDV’s twitter feed, you may also have seen this message promoting a short audio interview with Helen Duffett asking Jo the questions.

Posted in Blogger Interviews and Online politics | Also tagged , , and | Leave a comment
Advert



Recent Comments

  • Mark
    “In choosing to freeze fuel duty whilst partially removing the fare cap on bus journeys Rachel Reeves made a curious choice.” Indeed she did. It is al...
  • David Garlick
    Whatever you call it the inheritance tax hit on farmers is the wrong way to ensure that the country has a sound base to produce the food that we need . Farm lan...
  • Peter Martin
    @ Michael BG, The GDP of the UK last year was approx £2720 bn. So your figure of £1.16 bn represents just 0.05% of GDP. We can't measure GDP that accurate...
  • expats
    So, not only does Tim Farron want to exempt farmers from paying inheritance tax ( a far more generous inheritance tax system than the rest of the country pays) ...
  • Jack Nicholls
    One of the heartening things about the Democratic campaign has been the way Tim Walz has taken on the narrow right-wing distortion of the word 'freedom' that pr...