India on 13 December sought clarification from the World Trade Organization’s General Council (GC) chair whether the inclusion of item 18 on the GC agenda on “Information on Investment Facilitation for Development – Request from Chile and the Republic of Korea” was merely for information or any other purpose, during the adoption of the agenda.
The GC meeting, which was scheduled for 14-15 December, was advanced by a day due to a long list of items to be discussed.
Calls for reforms of the international financial architecture are becoming ever louder. Governments, UN institutions, expert groups and civil society organizations are criticizing the fact that the network of institutions and rules that currently determine global monetary and financial policy and control global financial flows are not up to the current crises. The international financial architecture is “outdated, dysfunctional and unfair”, according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
In view of these challenges, the UN Member States made the reform of the international financial architecture a priority topic of the UN Summit of the Future (SotF). It is due to take place at the level of Heads of State and Government in New York on 22 and 23 September 2024. The outcome will be a Pact for the Future. Its content will be negotiated in New York in the months leading up to the Summit. The following six topics are expected to be discussed in the negotiations on the global financial architecture:
i. Reforms of the international financial institutions
ii. Short-term liquidity and financial safety nets
But pending discussions and consensus on key proposals including those focused on introducing equity-related considerations to the IHR, more time has been sought to conclude the negotiations on amending these rules. In addition, critical issues such as definition of a pandemic; a tiered alert system for declaring health emergencies; and on financing mechanisms; are being addressed both in the forum to amend the IHR, and in parallel discussions towards a new Pandemic Agreement. Unless these key issues are addressed within the overall scope of governing health emergencies including also pandemics, changes to IHR cannot be approved in isolation, diplomatic sources explained to us this past week.
In today’s edition we bring you the state of play in the discussions towards a new Pandemic Agreement, where countries are tackling the toughest issues in global health in the shortest possible time.
The process could take two paths, a shorter, easier one that might lead to the final deadline in May 2024, albeit without much change in status quo. A second, more challenging one, with a longer timeline, but one that might lead to few but potentially significant changes in the governance of health emergencies particularly for response measures. It is beginning to appear that political expediency could very likely push the first approach.
Proposals on various textual amendments to the international Health Regulations (IHR) from the Bureau of the working group mandated to undertake the amendments raise concerns on an early harvest approach at the cost of excluding proposals on equity, especially those on equitable access.
2/07/2023
From October 23 to 27, 2023, 76 states met at the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council to negotiate an international human rights treaty to regulate companies and their value chains (also known as the “UN Treaty”). Since the UN Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 26/9 in 2014 and mandated an intergovernmental working group to draft such legally binding instrument, it has met nine times. After a slow start, the process has emerged surprisingly stronger from the ninth round of negotiations.
In 2005, developing countries, especially desperate South-East Asian countries hardest hit by the H5N1 outbreaks, failed to get access to vaccines developed using flu virus strains circulating in affected countries, shared through the network of laboratories known at that time as “Global Influenza Surveillance Network” (GISN).
The failures of the international COVID-19 response highlighted key gaps in pandemic preparedness and response (PPR). The G20 and WHO have called for additional funding of $10.5 billion per year to adequately strengthen the global PPR architecture. In response to these calls, in 2022 the World Bank announced the launch of a new Financial Intermediary Fund (The Pandemic Fund) to catalyse this additional funding. However, there is considerable unclarity regarding the governance makeup and financial modalities of the Pandemic Fund, and divergence of opinion about whether the Fund has been successfully designed to respond to key challenges in global health financing.
The adoption of a Global Digital Compact (GDC) as one of the outcomes of the Summit of the Future opens up the opportunity to address in a systematic manner issues that are of critical importance for the digital global governance. It also poses a challenge to developing countries, as most of them lack the infrastructure and capabilities to fully participate in the digital transformation. Many inequalities, including a deep digital divide, do exist and would need to be addressed by the GDC for it to become a real instrument of change and improvement in the living conditions and the prospects of a better future for most of the world population. This paper examines the current fragmentation in the digital governance and some of the issues raised by the proposals made by the UN Secretary-General for adoption of the GDC.
An informal mini-ministerial meeting held on 27 November failed to provide any political guidance on injecting momentum into the agriculture negotiations in the run-up to the upcoming World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13).
