The rock that remains: The trade deal between the European Union and the United Kingdom may be done, but the status of Gibraltar and its borders are not yet clear. The Associated Press reports:
Spain succeeded in convincing the EU to separate the issue of Gibraltar from the greater Brexit negotiations, meaning that Madrid is handling all talks directly with its counterparts in Gibraltar and London.
Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya said Thursday that if an agreement isn’t reached, she fears that the long lines of stranded truck drivers seen at the English Channel crossing this past week could be repeated.
On December 22, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to terminate the mandate of the joint African Union-United Nations force in the Darfur region of Sudan. The Council called for most of the mission’s more than 4,000 troops and 1600 police personnel to be withdrawn by June 2021. Now clashes have broken out in Darfur:
Adam Regal, a spokesman for a local organization that helps run refugee camps in Darfur, said the UNAMID exit would create a “security vacuum” in a region with several active militias.
In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, Jeremiah Mamabolo, the joint U.N.-African Union envoy for Darfur, said the transitional government in Khartoum needs to embark on the “huge task” of gaining the trust of the local people.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned the world against cutting funding for international public health once the pandemic has begun to recede:
“For too long, the world has operated on a cycle of panic and neglect,” he said.
“We throw money at an outbreak, and when it’s over, we forget about it and do nothing to prevent the next one. This is dangerously short-sighted, and frankly difficult to understand.”
For more on the dysfunctionalities of the WHO’s current funding model, see this earlier post.
The German Foreign Office looks back on the country’s just completed term on the UN Security Council. The postmortem cites, in particular, Germany’s work on Libya and its efforts to put climate change on the Council’s agenda (“despite resistance”). Germany’s ambitions to become a permanent Council member within a decade are explicit:
Germany wants to continue playing its part in preserving global peace – as a permanent member of the Security Council. “We have shown over the past two years that we are capable of filling a seat on the UN Security Council in the long term,” said Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. “We therefore want not only to stand for a non-permanent seat again in eight years’ time, but also seek to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council before that date.”
As the economic toll of the pandemic mounts, debt relief has moved to the top of the international agenda. Past economic crises have produced pressure for sovereign debt relief, but there is a notable difference this time around: China is a major creditor nation. To help grapple with this new reality, Anders Aslund and Djoomart Otorbaev argue that China should join the Paris Club of international creditor nations:
Established in 1956 with the first negotiation between Argentina and its official creditors in Paris, the group brings together finance ministry officials from major creditor countries to resolve debtors’ payment difficulties.
The problem is that China, the largest sovereign lender in the world, is not a member, because other leading creditors complain that its loans and lending conditions are not transparent. A common suspicion is that China uses this opacity to strike bilateral deals with debtor governments that are at its mercy.
But now that defaults are multiplying and higher volumes of debt are in arrears, China itself might be looking for a new approach. After all, it has not regulated its credits very well, its lending conditions are not standardized, and it has little experience with debt restructuring — a process usually guided by the IMF. It is clear that debtor countries, other creditors, and China all have an interest in it joining the Paris Club.
Briefly noted: