Daily Multilateralism

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

• Friction between the Ethiopian government and the United Nations over the Tigray conflict has boiled over, with armed confrontations between government security forces and UN workers and Ethiopian insinuations of international neocolonialism:

  Ethiopia’s government is pushing back against what it calls outside “interference,” from efforts at dialogue to delivering aid, drawing on its history as the rare African country never colonized, a source of deep national pride.

  The government wants to manage aid delivery, and on Tuesday it said its forces had shot at and detained U.N. staffers who allegedly broke through checkpoints while trying to reach areas where “they were not supposed to go.”

  The conflict and the diplomatic tensions it is producing are reverberating in the multilateral architecture. Ethiopia is both home to the African Union and one of the largest contributors of personnel to UN peacekeeping missions.

• The international charity Médecins Sans Frontières is backing calls by India and South Africa for the World Trade Organization to waive international intellectual property protections for covid-19 vaccines. The organization writes:

  Because the pandemic is an exceptional global crisis, the World Trade Organization (WTO) can invoke a waiver of certain IP rights on these technologies under WTO rules. Given this, South Africa and India submitted a landmark proposal earlier this year to the WTO requesting that WTO members waive four categories of IP rights – copyright, industrial designs, patents and undisclosed information under the Agreement of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) until the majority of the world population receives effective vaccines and develops immunity to COVID-19.

• The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, has ended a long-running examination into the conduct of British forces in Iraq. The inquiry was initially terminated by the court’s first prosecutor in 2006, on the grounds that alleged British crimes did not meet the “gravity threshold.” But in 2014, the prosecutor’s office reopened the examination in light of new evidence. In explaining the decision to end the examination, the prosecutor affirmed that there was substantial evidence that UK troops had committed crimes in Iraq but found that the British government’s own investigate processes were legitimate and did not amount to an attempt to shield perpetrators from punishment:

  [T]he Office could not substantiate allegations that the UK investigative and prosecutorial bodies had engaged in shielding, based on a careful scrutiny of the information before it. Having exhausted reasonable lines of enquiry arising from the information available, I therefore determined that the only professionally appropriate decision at this stage is to close the preliminary examination…

  Meanwhile, representatives of the ICC’s member states are engaging with candidates to serve as the court’s next chief prosecutor. These panel discussions can be viewed by the interested public.

• The UN General Assembly called on Israel to renounce nuclear weapons. The resolution mirrored others passed in recent years. Canada, Israel, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau and the United States opposed the measure while more than twenty countries (including the United Kingdom) abstained.

• The top UN human rights official, former Chilean president Michele Bachelet, has welcomed positive signals from the incoming Biden administration. She cited in particular “expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections, an increase of the number of refugees to be resettled, end of family separation, end to the construction of the border wall, and an overhaul of the asylum system.” It is widely anticipated that the Biden administration will seek a seat on the UN Human Rights Council and will engage much more broadly with the UN on human rights issues.

• Countries that have joined the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea are convening in New York to discuss the treaty and the work of institutions it created, including the Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Seabed Authority, and the UN Commission tasked with evaluating continental shelf claims.

• Briefly noted:

  • Splits have emerged on the Security Council about when to end the joint UN-African Union mission in the Darfur region of Sudan.

  • The BRICS countries have launched a new innovation center in China.

  • Australia is mulling action at the World Trade Organization as trade disputes with China mount.

  • An apparent disagreement about agenda items has scuppered a planned high-level dialogue between the European Union and the African Union.