Sixth Committee: legal; Strengthening laws against terrorism and other threats.

The Sixth Committee placed the issues of terrorism, the safety of United Nations personnel, and possible amendments to the United Nations Charter at the heart of its discussion during its sixtieth session. While the long-running debate on terrorism was bolstered by the General Assembly's adoption by consensus of 13 specific treaties on counter-terrorism, the Committee struggled with the drafting of a comprehensive convention on international terrorism, aimed at augmenting the 13 treaties and filling in the gaps in the international legal regime.

"The new convention tries to cap and complement all the other existing conventions", Committee Chairman Juan Antonio Yanez-Barnuevo of Spain told the UN Chronicle. "This will be a total ensemble." The comprehensive convention has been under discussion for over five years; however, it is caught in a complex sphere of political and legal trust among Member States, he said. The bone of contention is whether armed forces activities should be exempted from the convention's scope of application since those are governed by international humanitarian law, or whether the exemption should cover armed resistance groups involved in struggles against colonial domination and foreign occupation. Another major point of difference has been on "how to distinguish what has to be prosecuted as a terrorist attack and acts that in certain cases may be lawful over an armed conflict", Ambassador Yanez-Barnuevo said.

During the debate, Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury of Bangladesh said that terrorism did not discriminate between races, cultures or faiths. He expressed regret that there had been a deliberate attempt to link terrorism with a certain faith, saying that terrorism was antithetical to the teachings of Islam. "Islam advocates peace, tolerance, non-violence and harmony. It would be in our collective interest to devote our resources-intellectual and material-to offset this vicious campaign". Hjalmar Hannesson of Iceland pointed out that the reason for terrorist action did not matter, since there was no such thing as "justifiable terrorism". Any just cause that terrorists might claim to be fighting for was only harmed by the hideousness of the means they chose. Nations had to come to an agreement on a definition of the term "terrorism", he said, for without a consensus on what constituted terrorism, nations could not unite against it.

Inder Jit of India said that if the General Assembly abdicated its central role in the process, the Security Council would continue to deal with the issue of a definition of terrorism in a "partial, piecemeal manner". By a draft resolution adopted without a vote, the Ad Hoc Committee established by General Assembly resolution 51/210 would resume its elaboration of the draft comprehensive convention in February 2006.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Another topic that dominated the session was the creation of a new instrument that would provide legal protection for United Nations and associated personnel in "peacebuilding" missions that go beyond peacekeeping operations. "The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel" was adopted without a vote, expanding the scope of the 1994 Convention to cover UN personnel involved in the delivery of humanitarian, political or development assistance in "peacebuilding", or of emergency humanitarian assistance. "This will enlarge the field of protection for UN personnel to humanitarian and peacebuilding operations", Mr. Yanez-Barnuevo said. "Until now, peacekeeping has been a concept that has been evolving in resolutions of the General Assembly or the Security Council, and it is for the first time that a concept of peacebuilding has been included in an international legal instrument of this kind." The Optional Protocol comes at a time when the number of deadly attacks against UN personnel have risen from 13 in 2004 to 23 in 2005--a 77-percent increase--and deaths have risen from 19 in 2004 to 32 in 2005.

The 1994 Convention, which entered into force in 1999, was a key legal instrument that provide United Nations and associated personnel the security and the environment they need to do their work. "But the Convention had a serious flaw", Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his remarks to the Assembly. "Humanitarian, development and other non-peacekeeping operations were covered only through a declaration of exceptional risk. But this requirement was impractical. There are no generally agreed criteria for determining whether such a risk exists", he said. However, "the new protocol corrects this flaw", he added. Under the new instrument, a host State may also make a declaration that it shall not apply the Optional Protocol's provisions with respect to the delivery of emergency humanitarian assistance in response to a natural disaster. The Optional Protocol will be open for signature on 16 January 2006 and enter into force 30 days after 22 instruments of ratification or accession have been deposited with the Secretary-General.

The term "peacebuilding" in Article 2 of the Optional Protocol was a subject of extensive discussion during Committee debate. Rose Makena Muchiri of Kenya said that while her country supported, in principle, the inclusion of the concept of "peacebuilding", such a concept should be limited to conflict and post-conflict situations. Kenya was flexible on the Protocol's applicability concerning delivery of humanitarian assistance in response to natural disasters, but the necessity for an "opt-on" or "opt-out" declaration should be carefully considered, since it could create an unnecessary bottleneck in the Protocol's implementation, she said. Ben Playle of Australia, evoking memories of the deplorable 19 August 2003 terrorist attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad, recalled that no one had yet been held accountable. Australia particularly welcomed the willingness to extend automatic application of the Convention to the delivery of assistance in "peacebuilding" and that it was a good compromise solution. However, he was reluctant in accepting a narrow provision enabling States to opt-out from applying the Optional Protocol to such UN operations in response to natural disasters.

The Committee diverted its attention to the growing sector of e-commerce. On its recommendation, the General Assembly adopted without a vote a resolution inviting Governments to consider becoming parties to the United Nations Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts. Prepared by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, the instrument is intended to remove obstacles to such use, including those that might arise under existing international trade law regimes. Most of the texts were negotiated long before the development of new technology, such as e-mail, electronic data interchange and the Internet. The Convention aims at establishing a uniform regime for contracting parties all over the world on what rules apply across boundaries. Simply put, "it works like E-bay, where you can buy or sell things", Mr. Yanez-Barnuevo said. "It will also be more secure for people to participate in this form of commerce as rules are definite."

The Committee's discussion on sanctions largely focused on developing "smart sanctions", which do not adversely affect the civilian population and create humanitarian problems, the Chairman said, adding that "unfortunately, there have been no final recommendations." The permanent members of the Security Council prefer that sanctions be dealt with by the Council and applied as a pressure tool on certain countries that do not abide with international obligations, Mr. Yanez-Barnuevo said. However, with the General Assembly raising concerns regarding sanctions inadvertently affecting humanitarian and socio-economic situations, "the Council has become more attentive in imposing smart sanctions, as opposed to blanket sanctions, that are aimed, for instance, at leaders of certain countries or certain factions who are an obstacle to the peace process or gravely endanger human rights", he said.

Martin Andjaba of Namibia, speaking for the African Group, noted that since the establishment of the United Nations, the Security Council had imposed a total of 19 sanctions regimes on 14 countries, 11 of them in Africa. Sanctions should be smart and targeted to mitigate humanitarian and socio-economic effects, he said, and to that end the United Nations needed to define the objectives and guidelines for the imposition of sanctions. Andril Sybyha of Ukraine said that recent studies had shown that the majority of sanctions regimes imposed by the Council in the 1990s had had a moderate to low, or even zero, political effectiveness. The time had come to carry out an analytical review of existing policy and practices. Sanctions were a powerful tool, but they should not become an instrument for punishing States and peoples, and should not result in economic destabilization of the targeted country or a "third" State. Delegates urged a review of the objectives of United Nations-imposed sanctions, with particular attention paid to their adverse effects on "third" countries.

The Committee also debated on the annual report of the Special Committee on the Charter of the United Nations and on the Strengthening of the Role of the Organization. Established during the twenty-ninth session of the General Assembly in 1974, the Special Committee was given a mandate to decide on government proposals concerning the effective functioning of the United Nations. The Committee approved a total of 12 resolutions by consensus, including observer status for four intergovernmental organizations: the Latin American Integration Association; the Common Fund for Commodities; the Hague Conference on Private International Law; and the Ibero-American Conference.

Regarding the Committee's work programme, certain delegates expressed concern over its shrinking agenda. Costa Rica's representative brought attention to the apparent imbalance in the division of work next year among the six main Committees of the General Assembly, noting that some were expected to consider as many as 60 items, in contrast to the Sixth Committee, which would consider only seven. It was not for a dearth of legal issues that the Committee's programme had dwindled, he said, but many legal topics were being considered by the Assembly and its subsidiary bodies, including in the Third Committee (Humanitarian, Cultural and Social) on indemnification of victims under international law, which was rightfully a Legal Committee topic.

RELATED ARTICLE: Regional Agreements Crucial for Freshwater Management

Supplies of quality freshwater worldwide are increasingly limited, with less than 1 per cent readily accessible for human use. More than 40 per cent of the global population lives in river basins experiencing "water stress", or frequent shortages.

In 2000, at least 1.1 billion persons--1 in 6--lacked access to safe drinking water; in Asia and Africa the rate is 2 in 5. In densely populated Bangladesh, the danger from bacteria-contaminated surface waters has shifted to arsenic-laden groundwater as rural villagers increasingly get water from handpumps for domestic use.

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

Over a billion people in Asia and 150 million in Latin America already depend on groundwater. The movement and recharge rates of underground water sources and the threats from pollution are often poorly understood. Experts say that large underground aquifers, such as North Africa's Nubian Aquifer that stretches under vast deserts in Egypt, Libya and perhaps other countries, or the Guarani Aquifer shared by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, are too important to mankind's future to be left unmanaged. Comprehensive multi-state and stakeholder water resources management is needed to ensure that underground aquifers do not suffer from environmental degradation and depletion, experts say.

Carlos Duarte of Brazil told the Sixth Committee that regional agreements and approaches played a fundamental role in reconciling national interests and international concerns regarding water resources. Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay had set up a legal framework to regulate rights and duties regarding the Guarani Aquifer and had been able to reach an understanding on most issues. A grant of $27 million from the Global Environmental Facility--a funding consortium managed by the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank--will help these four countries find a common institutional and technical framework to preserve the Guarani Aquifer as a supplier of clean freshwater for future generations.

--Jonas Hagen