Daily Multilateralism
Monday, November 16, 2020
The Swiss government has budgeted more than $25 million for its bid to join the UN Security Council in 2023-2024. Switzerland only joined the United Nations in 2002 and is one of more than sixty countries never to have served as a Security Council member. According to the foreign ministry, the government selected the 2023-2024 window because there were no other announced candidates in the regional group to which Switzerland belongs. (Subsequently, Malta announced its own bid.)
China joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), along with fourteen other countries in the region. Quartz’s Jane Li offers this analysis:
The new trade deal…covers a population of roughly 2.2 billion and economies whose combined GDP exceeds $26 trillion. It has been under negotiation since 2012, with India dropping out along the way. While the deal still needs to be ratified by the respective member countries, it’s already a major achievement to have China, Japan, and South Korea, whose historic tensions have colored contemporary trade, within the same framework.
In a published interview, French president Emmanuel Macron lamented blockages in the multilateral system and at the UN Security Council in particular. He said the Council “no longer produces useful solutions.” In recent years, France has been the most assertive of the permanent members in advocating reform to the Council’s membership and working procedures. Paris has endorsed expanding both the number of permanent and elected Council members. In 2013, the French government proposed limitations on the use of the veto in mass atrocity situations.
India has objected to several of China’s proposals for a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea. Since 2002, China and countries from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have intermittently negotiated a code to govern maritime activities in the region and defuse tensions. The Economic Times reports that one of India’s opposes proposed restrictions on outside naval activities in the region:
Beijing has been pressurising Asean members states to insert certain clauses in the Code to restrict Japan, India, the US and Australia as well as other nations from engaging in maritime security cooperation with the South East Asian states and exploring resources in the South China Sea…
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has published its annual report on hate crimes:
[The] hate crime dataset is the largest of its kind worldwide, and gathers together information both from official and civil society sources. A total of 39 OSCE states reported official hate crime data to ODIHR for 2019, including 25 states that provided figures classified by bias motivation. The dataset includes a record number of 3,207 statistical and 3,757 descriptive hate crime incidents reported by civil society, which translates into a minimum of 4,621 hate crime victims.
Further complicating already tense negotiations, a member of the International Monetary Fund’s mission to Argentina has tested positive for COVID-19. Via Reuters:
A spokesman for Argentina’s Central Bank said officials that had met with the IMF team in recent days would also isolate and take tests, but none had shown symptoms of the virus.
Argentina is looking to update its $57 billion IMF agreement struck two years ago that failed to prevent a slide into recession and the country’s ninth sovereign default.
Briefly noted:
Several United Nations human rights experts warned about an ongoing crackdown on civil society in Cambodia.
Remembering Kenya’s history on the UN Security Council.
The European Union is exploring ways to toughen its stance toward Belarus.