The United Nations’ highest court has found that countries can be held legally responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions, in a ruling highly anticipated by Pacific countries long frustrated with the pace of global action to address climate change.

In a landmark opinion delivered yesterday in The Hague, the president of the International Court of Justice, Yuji Iwasawa, said climate change was an “urgent and existential threat” that was “unequivocally” caused by human activity with consequences and effects that crossed borders.

The court’s opinion was the culmination of six years of advocacy and diplomatic manoeuvring which started with a group of Pacific university students in 2019.

• READ MORE: ICJ climate crisis ruling: Will world’s top court back Pacific-led call to hold governments accountable?
• Do countries have a duty to prevent climate harm? The world’s highest court is about to answer this crucial question
• Other climate crisis reports

They were frustrated at what they saw was a lack of action to address the climate crisis, and saw current mechanisms to address it as woefully inadequate.

Their idea was backed by the government of Vanuatu, which convinced the UN General Assembly to seek the court’s advisory opinion on what countries’ obligations are under international law.

The court’s 15 judges were asked to provide an opinion on two questions: What are countries obliged to do under existing international law to protect the climate and environment, and, second, what are the legal consequences for governments when their acts — or lack of action — have significantly harmed the climate and environment?

Overnight, reading a summary that took nearly two hours to deliver, Iwasawa said states had clear obligations under international law, and that countries — and, by extension, individuals and companies within those countries — were required to curb emissions.

Iwasawa said the environment and human rights obligations set out in international law did indeed apply to climate change.

‘Precondition for human rights’
“The protection of the environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights,” he said, adding that sea-level rise, desertification, drought and natural disasters “may significantly impair certain human rights, including the right to life”.

To reach its conclusion, judges waded through tens of thousands of pages of written submissions and heard two weeks of oral arguments in what the court said was the ICJ’s largest-ever case, with more than 100 countries and international organisations providing testimony.

They also examined the entire corpus of international law — including human rights conventions, the law of the sea, the Paris climate agreement and many others — to determine whether countries have a human rights obligation to address climate change.

Major powers and emitters, like the United States and China, had argued in their testimonies that existing UN agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, were sufficient to address climate change.

But the court found that states’ obligations extended beyond climate treaties, instead to many other areas of international law, such as human rights law, environmental law, and laws around restricting cross-border harm.

Significantly for many Pacific countries, the court also provided an opinion on what would happen if sea levels rose to such a level that some states were lost altogether.

“Once a state is established, the disappearance of one of its constituent elements would not necessarily entail the loss of its statehood.”

READ HERE: The summary of the #ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. https://t.co/7TWc7ifwfX pic.twitter.com/vVxxwpZpbX

— CIJ_ICJ (@CIJ_ICJ) July 23, 2025

Significant legal weight
The ICJ’s opinion is legally non-binding. But even so, advocates say it carries significant legal and political weight that cannot be ignored, potentially opening the floodgates for climate litigation and claims for compensation or reparations for climate-related loss and damage.

Individuals and groups could bring lawsuits against their own countries for failing to comply with the court’s opinion, and states could also return to the International Court of Justice to hold each other to account.

The opinion would also be a powerful precedent for legislators and judges to call on as they tackle questions related to the climate crisis, and give small countries greater weight in negotiations over future COP agreements and other climate mechanisms.

Outside the court, several dozen climate activists, from both the Netherlands and abroad, had gathered on a square as cyclists and trams rumbled by on the summer afternoon. Among them was Siaosi Vaikune, a Tongan who was among those original students to hatch the idea for the challenge.

“Everyone has been waiting for this moment,” he said. “It’s been six years of campaigning.

“Frontline communities have demanded justice again and again,” Vaikune said. “And this is another step towards that justice.”

‘It gives hope’
Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu said the ruling was better than he expected and he was emotional about the result.

“The most pleasing aspect is [the ruling] was so strong in the current context where climate action and policy seems to be going backwards,” Regenvanu told RNZ Pacific.

“It gives such hope to the youth, because they were the ones who pushed this.

“I think it will regenerate an entire new generation of youth activists to push their governments for a better future for themselves.”

Regenvanu said the result showed the power of multilateralism.

“There was a point in time where everyone could compromise to agree to have this case heard here, and then here again, we see the court with the judges from all different countries of the world all unanimously agreeing on such a strong opinion, it gives you hope for multilateralism.”

He said the Pacific now has more leverage in climate negotiations.

“Communities on the ground, who are suffering from sea level rise, losing territory and so on, they know what they want, and we have to provide that,” Regenvanu said.

“Now we know that we can rely on international cooperation because of the obligations that have been declared here to assist them.”

The director of climate change at the Pacific Community (SPC), Coral Pasisi, also said the decision was a strong outcome for Pacific Island nations.

“The acknowledgement that the science is very clear, there is a direct clause between greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and the harm that is causing, particularly the most vulnerable countries.”

She said the health of the environment is closely linked to the health of people, which was acknowledged by the court.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It was the third United Nations Ocean Conference, a high-level forum meant to advance the U.N.’s sustainable development goal to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans.” This year’s co-hosts, France and Costa Rica, urged other countries to step up marine conservation efforts in light of overlapping ocean crises, from plastic pollution and ocean acidification to rising sea levels that are jeopardizing small island nations. António Guterres, the U.N.’s secretary-general, said in his opening remarks that oceans are “the ultimate shared resource” and that they should foster multilateral cooperation.

Whether the conference was a success depends on whom you ask. The most prominent outcome of the meeting was a flurry of voluntary and rhetorical commitments made by countries to conserve marine resources. Some of these, like France’s pledge to limit a destructive kind of fishing called bottom trawling, were criticized as insufficient. France had also promoted the conference as a sort of deadline for reaching 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty — a threshold needed for it to enter into force — but this didn’t happen, leading to disappointment among ocean advocates

On the other hand, experts said there were real signs of progress. Germany and the European Union pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward marine conservation, for example, and 11 governments signed a new pledge to safeguard coral reefs. Nearly 20 countries ratified the high seas treaty over just a few days, bringing the total up to 50.

Angelique Pouponneau, the lead ocean negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc of 39 countries, said in a statement that the conference had been “a moment of both progress and reflection.” Former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, who also served as special envoy on climate under the Biden administration, noted “critical momentum to safeguard our planet.” 

The biggest focus of the U.N. Ocean Conference was the high seas treaty, also known as the agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions. Adopted by U.N. member states in 2023 after more than 20 years of negotiations, the treaty aims to solve a longstanding problem in marine protection: how to safeguard parts of the ocean that lie outside countries’ “exclusive economic zones,” swaths of water that stretch about 200 nautical miles beyond their coastlines. As of now, countries can unilaterally create marine protected areas within their economic zones. They usually restrict resource extraction and industrial fishing in these areas, often with exceptions for small-scale fishers. Many countries have established such zones, but they need the high seas treaty to create a legal framework for doing the same thing in more distant waters.

France had made it a priority to reach 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty either before or during the third Ocean Conference; doing so would kick off a 120-day countdown for the agreement to enter into force. Not enough countries signed on, though the conference did seem to accelerate the ratification process: At a special event on the conference’s first day, 18 countries announced their ratification, including several small coastal states like Ivory Coast and Vanuatu, bringing the total to 50 (including the European Union, which has ratified it as a bloc). Each country has its own laws and processes for ratifying treaties; upon ratification, it formally lets the U.N. know and agrees to be bound by the terms of the relevant treaty.

France’s special envoy to the talks, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, wrote on LinkedIn that he expects the remaining ratifications by the next U.N. General Assembly meeting this September. That would still be pretty fast, compared to other multilateral environmental agreements. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example — the world’s main legal framework for regulating maritime activities like shipping and fishing, and for establishing countries’ exclusive economic zones —— took eight years to reach 60 ratifications. Only a few agreements, like the Paris Agreement to address global warming, were ratified faster.

Rebecca Hubbard, director of a coalition of environmental nonprofits advocating for the high seas treaty called High Seas Alliance, said in a statement that the world was “within striking distance” of the 60th ratification. “The treaty’s entry into force could be triggered in a matter of weeks,” she said.

Several experts Grist spoke with said marine protected areas are essential for advancing the U.N. target to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water by 2030. Robert Blasiak, an associate professor of sustainable ocean stewardship at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Center, estimated that without a high seas treaty, countries would have to designate some 90 percent of their waters as marine protected areas — an unlikely scenario. French Polynesia, however, made a splash at the Ocean Conference by declaring the entirety of its exclusive economic zone — all 1.9 million square miles of it — a marine protected area, making it the largest in the world.

Other declarations and pledges from the U.N. Ocean Conference linked oceans to climate change, plastic pollution, economic inequality, and the erosion of public trust in science. During daily plenaries, many delegates delivered statements about a healthy ocean’s role in mitigating global warming — it absorbs 90 percent of the excess heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels — and some called for nations to “emphasize the essential role of ocean-based solutions”

 in their climate targets under the Paris Agreement, for example by protecting ocean ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs. Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho, the princess of Tonga, called for whales to be recognized as legal persons — part of a broader movement to establish inherent rights for natural entities.

Leaders from many countries also reiterated calls for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, including French president Emmanuel Macron, who called it “madness” to proceed with mineral extraction from the largely unexplored seafloor. Separately, nearly 100 national representatives released a statement reaffirming their commitment to crafting an “ambitious” U.N. plastics treaty during negotiations that are set to resume this August. And a letter signed by more than 100 scientists, Indigenous leaders, and environmental advocates called for the adoption of an “ocean protection principle” that prioritizes conservation over the “irresponsible and unrestrained pursuit of profit.”

One pledge that was not well received was French president Emmanuel Macron’s promise to “limit” bottom trawling, a type of commercial fishing that involves dragging a heavy net across the bottom of the ocean, kicking up debris and releasing carbon dioxide in the process. Environmental groups lambasted the plan for applying to only 4 percent of French waters — mostly in places where bottom trawling does not occur, according to the international nonprofit Oceana. “These announcements are more symbolic than impactful,” the group’s campaign director, Nicolas Fournier, said in a statement.

Other groups said the conference hadn’t placed enough emphasis on issues such as offshore oil and gas extraction and the rights of fishers. They noted with caution the nonbinding nature of many countries’ pledges and urged world leaders to “turn promises into action.” 

“Ultimately, this summit produced a mere drop in the bucket of what we desperately need to protect the ocean — the lungs of our planet,” Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and National Geographic explorer, said in a statement.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Progress and frustration mark the UN’s third Ocean Conference on Jun 16, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Choe, one of North Korea’s most influential officials, is a close ally of the Kim family. He gained major influence after becoming director of the Organisation and Guidance Department, or OGD, in 2017, effectively acting as the regime’s second-in-command with a wide-reaching informal power network.

Since then, Choe’s inner circle has rapidly ascended to key positions across the party, military, and state institutions, said South Korea’s National Assembly Research Service in a report published on Saturday. Its findings are based on an analysis of publicly available information, including reports from North Korea’s state-run media outlets.

The report identifies key military figures – Ri Yong Gil, No Kwang Chol, and Kim Su Gil – as part of Choe’s informal network. All three worked closely with Choe during his earlier stint as director of the General Political Bureau in 2012 and were later promoted to top military posts: Chief of the General Staff, Minister of People’s Armed Forces, and Director of the General Political Bureau, respectively.

Similarly, several lesser-known party figures, including cabinet premier Pak Thae Song, have emerged in prominent central roles, riding the wave of Choe’s expanding influence, according to the report.

This concentration of power has come at the cost of internal checks and balances that shore up the North’s authoritarian Supreme Leader system among the elite, the report said.

Once seen as a potential Choe counterweight, Kim Yo Jong – leader Kim Jong Un’s sister – stepped down from all formal posts at the 8th Party Congress in January 2021, following a surge in succession rumors the previous year.

Several media reports, citing Chinese sources, have claimed that Kim Yo Jong married Choe’s son, although this has not been officially confirmed.

Another former challenger, Jo Yong Won, attempted to bolster his influence by holding dual positions in the party and military, but was curbed by Choe’s aggressive consolidation of power. Jo’s recent appearances have been largely limited to provincial development events.

The Kim family has historically maintained its grip on power through a tightly controlled hereditary system, centralizing authority around the Supreme Leader.

Key positions in the party, military, and state have consistently been filled by loyalists or family members, reinforcing dynastic rule.

The founder Kim Il Sung established the model of absolute leadership, which was passed down to Kim Jong Il and later to Kim Jong Un, with propaganda, purges, and elite surveillance used to eliminate rivals and ensure total loyalty to the ruling family.

Decline in purges

The report also noted a striking decline in Kim Jong Un’s once-routine purges of senior officials – a hallmark of his earlier rule – after Choe’s appointment to the OGD in 2017.

It cited the survival of cabinet premier Kim Tok Hun, who was harshly criticized by Kim as a “political novice” in 2023, and Pak Thae Song, who botched a military satellite launch but was nonetheless granted further opportunities.

These developments, according to the report, reflect Kim Jong Un’s tacit reliance on Choe’s authority to navigate mounting economic hardships under sanctions and rapidly shifting international dynamics.

“Kim Jong Un appears to have entrusted Choe Ryong Hae with a stabilising role to maintain regime continuity amid external pressures,” the report said.

But the report also noted that the weakening of competition and oversight within North Korea’s elite class could eventually lead to instability.

“The dismantling of internal checks among the ruling elite undermines the guiding principle of surveillance and restraint that underpins the Supreme Leader system – a paradox that could compromise regime stability in the long run.”

Edited by Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.

He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?

So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.

But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).

Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours

Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

“It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’

“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

‘Strongly in sync’

Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

That’s worked well, hasn’t it?

“The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.

“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..

“Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”

It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”

Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”

And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.

Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.

“We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.

Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”

So it really is a cosy setup.

Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”

Sheer bribery

Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.

“We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”

QME’s collision with international law

He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.

Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.

Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?

A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:

(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.

(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.

(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

(4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.

(5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

(6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

(7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.

Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.

Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency

As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.

It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.

Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.

Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.

The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.

With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?

One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

The U.N. mechanism is a peer review of each member state’s human rights record. It takes place every 4 ½ years and includes reports on progress made since the previous review cycle and recommendations on how a country can better fulfill its human rights obligations.

CPJ’s submission, together with the MENA Rights Group, a Geneva-based advocacy organization, and the local human rights groups Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq and Community Peacemaker Teams Iraq, shows that journalists face threats, online harassment, physical violence, and civil and criminal lawsuits.

The submission notes an escalating crackdown on civic space in Iraq where crimes against journalists are rarely investigated, fueling a cycle of violence against the press, while public officials have voiced anti-press rhetoric and attempted to limit access to information.

Iraq is ranked 6th in CPJ’s Global Impunity Index 2023, with 17 unsolved murders of journalists, and is one of the few countries to have been on the Index every year since its inception in 2007.

CPJ’s UPR submission on Iraq is available in English here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Since her biographical information has never been officially stated, the recall on the film is actually raising suspicions,” a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

Most North Koreans don’t know her name – Ko Yong Hui – or that she was born in Osaka, Japan, or that her father, Ko Gyon Taek, managed a military factory in the city prior to the end of World War II. 

The documentary, titled “Mother of Great Songun Korea,” leaves out all those facts, the sources said. In lieu of her name, the film referred to her as “respected mother” and showed many scenes of her at Kim Jong Il’s side during his official appearances. 

It was distributed internally to high-ranking officials, government agencies, and the military on VCD, or video compact disc, in 2011, the same year that Kim Jong Il died.

“Recently, judicial agencies such as the Provincial State Security Department and the Social Security Department have begun rounding up copies of propaganda materials,” the resident said.

“Instructions were given to retrieve and delete documentary films related to the general secretary’s biological mother,” he said, explaining that “Mother of Great Songun Korea” was on the undisclosed list of now-banned materials.

The recall was also confirmed by a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang, who told RFA in the now-banned documentary that “Ko Yong Hui, is touted as having ‘accumulated great achievements that brought about a bright future’” for North Korea.

Made in Japan

Ko was raised in Japan as part of the Korean minority in the country, and in 1962, the family moved to North Korea as part of a repatriation program. 

In the early 1970s, Ko appeared as a dancer in the Mansudae Art Troupe – a popular group of musicians known for propaganda performances that glorify the state and its leaders.

It is not known when she got together with Kim Jong Il, but she is believed to have met him in the early 1970s, and she bore him three children in the 1980s, including Kim Jong Un. Though most sources describe her as having been his mistress, some suggest she may have been his third wife. The government has never acknowledged any marriage between them, however.

According to North Korea’s songbun caste system, Ko would be of the lowest caste because she was born in Japan, her father’s job supported the Japanese war effort, and her occupation as a dancer – which would tarnish Kim Jong Un’s image.

Ko’s background does not neatly fit the nation’s founding myth that its leaders are descended from the so-called Paektu Line, named after the Korean peninsula’s tallest mountain, which is the setting of many of the Korean nation’s founding myths, including the lore of the Kim Dynasty.

Kim’s grandfather, national founder Kim Il Sung is the progenitor of the line, and his first wife Kim Jong Suk – Kim Jong Il’s mother – fought alongside her husband in his guerilla army against Japanese rule prior to and during World War II, giving Kim Jong Il near mythical status as the legitimate son of two popular national heroes.

“In the past, previous leaders inherited power based on the purity of the Paektu bloodline and the legitimacy of revolutionary traditions,” the North Hamgyong resident said. 

“Details about the birth and lives of the leaders as well as their siblings, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, were made public and promoted as patriotic examples.”

Erasing sensitive information?

In contrast, Kim Jong Un, due to his mother’s background, could be seen not as a third-generation revolutionary leader, but the illegitimate son of Kim Jong Il’s Japan-born mistress whose father supported the imperialist war effort.

If it becomes widely known, that support of imperial Japan could cause problems for Kim Jong Un, Bruce Bennett, a senior researcher at the California-based RAND Corporation, told RFA.

"Kim is trying to wipe out anything that would potentially challenge his control of the country,” said Bennett. “So the issue of his maternal grandfather having supported the Japanese I mean that's something that could really hurt him potentially. 

“And so that's part of the history he wants to get rid of,” he said.

Bennett said erasing facts about his mother might marginally help his case to stay in power, but it would be more helpful were he to improve the economy and his people’s lives.

The lack of available information about Ko is causing residents to question what they have been told about their leader, Kim Jong Un, the Ryanggang resident said.

“As the biography of the leader has not been made public even after him having been in power for 12 years, some are raising doubts about the identity of his mysterious birth mother,” he said. “The argument is that if there is no dishonorable family history in the pure Paektu bloodline, there is no reason not to disclose details about her.”

Kim Jong Il was able to claim that his hereditary succession was legitimate because of the purity of his lineage to the Paektu bloodline, the second resident said. 

Kim Jong Un claims the same lineage, but the secrecy appears to be giving people doubts.

“Given the actions of the authorities, who are ordering the recall and destruction of copies of the already released documentary film about his mother, people are questioning whether his is a half-lineage,” the second resident said.

Translated by Claire S. Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kim Jieun for RFA Korean.

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This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

State media released images of the three portraits adorning the facade of the Central Cadres Training School of the Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang during the school’s opening ceremony this week. 

The three portraits were also shown above the chalkboard in one of the classrooms.

Photos of the first two dynastic leaders, national founder Kim Il Sung, and his son and successor Kim Jong Il, are displayed in every public building and private home. They are treated with such respect that citizens have been praised in state media for dashing into their burning homes to rescue the portraits.

Until now, Kim Jong Un’s photo had not been displayed next to his predecessors in an official setting. It’s not yet known if this will become the norm nationwide. 

Should the display of all three leaders be mandated by law, it would suggest that Kim Jong Un demands more respect than his father did. Displays of Kim Jong Il’s portrait only became mandatory upon his death in 2011, though people voluntarily hung it up while he was still living as a display of patriotism. 

Kim Il Sung portraits, meanwhile, have been mandatory since the 1970s.

Murals and music video

The move comes amid other propaganda efforts to elevate Kim Jong Un’s status. 

Just a few weeks ago, the country debuted a new music video that casts him as the “friendly father of the nation.” New murals depicting Kim have been erected nationwide over the past few years.

These are all examples of the systematic idolization of Kim Jong Un carried out in stages according to Kim In-tae, a senior researcher at the South Korea-based Institute for National Security Strategy.

The portrait display follows the trend of “placing Kim Jong Un at the pinnacle of North Korea's collectivism and totalitarianism,” he told RFA Korean.

By placing his photo alongside his father and grandfather, Kim is trying to inherit the legacy and revolutionary tradition of his predecessors, Hong Min, from the North Korean Research Division at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification, told RFA.

“It shows that he has gone from prioritizing his predecessors and setting himself at a level lower than them to now standing as a leader of the exact same level,” said Hong, adding his prediction that the country will now start heavily promoting Kim Jong Un’s own ideological principles.

The cadre school’s opening ceremony also served to cast Kim as a champion of socialism, as portraits of prominent communist ideologues Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin also were also on display, Hyun In-ae, from Seoul’s Ewha Womans University noted.   

“It seems they declared to the whole world, ‘We are orthodox socialism,’” she said. “At the same time, this also signifies a declaration to the world that Kim Jong Un is the firm leader of North Korea.”

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Jeong-eun for RFA Korean.

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When I registered to attend last month’s United Nations conference in Canada, organizers insisted it would be a “plastic free meeting.” I wouldn’t even get a see-through sleeve for my name tag, they warned; I’d have to reuse an old lanyard.

After all, representatives from roughly 170 countries were gathering to tackle a crisis: The world churns out 400 million metric tons of plastic a year. It clogs landfills and oceans; its chemical trail seeps into our bodies. Delegates have been meeting since 2022 as part of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in hopes of ending this year with a treaty that addresses “the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.”

The challenge before delegates seemed daunting: How do you get hundreds of negotiators to agree on anything via live, group editing? Especially when representatives from fossil fuel and chemical companies would be vigorously working to shift the conversation away from what scientists say is the only solution to the crisis: curbing plastic production.

But when I got to the meeting, I discovered those industry reps were not the sideshow; they were welcomed into the main event.

They could watch closed-door sessions off limits to reporters. Some got high-level badges indistinguishable from those worn by country representatives negotiating the treaty. These badges allowed them access to exclusive discussions not open to some of the world’s leading health scientists.

In a setting that was supposed to level the inequalities among those present, I watched how country delegates and conference organizers did little to minimize them, making what was already going to be a challenging process needlessly opaque and avoidably contentious.

With such high stakes, I asked the INC Secretariat — the staff at the UN Environment Programme who facilitated the negotiations process — why they hadn’t set rules on conflict of interest or transparency. They told me that wasn’t their job, that it was up to countries to take the lead. But in some cases, countries pointed me right back to the UN.

Over five days, I would come to understand just how hard it will be to get meaningful action on plastics.

From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center.

Their message: Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. (I could almost see the marketing pitch: Think of the children!)

These plastics deliver water, read one, depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.

I headed to the media registration desk and got my green-striped badge, which placed me at the lowest rung of the pecking order.

At the top were people on official delegations. Their red-striped badges opened the door to every meeting, from the large “plenaries” where rows of country representatives spoke into microphones, to smaller working groups where negotiators hashed out specifics like whether to ban certain chemicals used in plastic.

The majority of the attendees wore orange badges. This hodgepodge of so-called observers included scientists, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and some industry reps, though the color code made no distinction among them.

Observers were allowed into certain working groups at the discretion of government delegates.

Reporters could attend only plenaries.

These huge, open sessions were like the UN equivalent of Senate floor speeches: declarations and repetition to get ideas into the public record.

Veteran observers tracked the real action in the margins, standing in the back of the ballroom to watch who was talking to whom. It was an art, they said: You want to stroll close enough to read the small print on name tags, but you have to be chill about it.

I was not chill about the lack of access, which prevented sources from talking about what happened behind closed-door proceedings. They were governed by rules that prohibited those present from recording the meetings or revealing who had said what.

Reporters trying to inform the public and hold governments accountable were completely shut out. Yet somehow the rules allowed the industry whose survival depends on more plastic production to dispatch reps to watch negotiators at work.

The rules follow the “norms when it comes to fundamentals of negotiating, multilateralism, and diplomacy amongst UN Member States,” said a statement from the INC Secretariat. These meetings are managed by the countries negotiating the treaty, the statement said; the countries set the rules.

But when I asked the U.S. State Department, which led the U.S. delegation in Ottawa, whether journalists should have more access, a spokesperson directed me back to the UN.

I heard about an exhibit at the nearby Westin hosted by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. It sounded like an environmental group, but an online search showed it was founded by corporations including Dow and ExxonMobil. Dow didn’t respond to a request for comment. ExxonMobil said it attended the conference “to be a resource, bring solutions to the table and listen to a broad range of views by all stakeholders.”

As I wandered through the ballroom stocked with refreshments, shiny videos and diagrams promoted the potential of “circularity,” a marketing term that’s often focused on recycling. Independent research shows pollution will skyrocket if companies don’t curb production, but the industry has, for decades, shifted attention from that with false promises about waste management.

“The work we do is not the whole solution,” the alliance later told me in an email.

But I could easily see someone leaving the exhibit with that impression.

The finer points of plastic science, from its toxic manufacturing process to the limits of recycling, are highly technical and complex.

While countries like the United States could afford to fly in multiple experts to inform government delegates, other countries could not.

Later that day, I met Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, who was among 60 independent, volunteer researchers who had traveled to Canada in hopes of bridging that gap in access to expertise.

As part of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, they shared fact sheets and peer-reviewed studies and made themselves available for questions. Carney Almroth said ensuring the integrity of the group was vital. Members must have a proven track record of researching plastic pollution and follow a conflict-of-interest policy to prevent bias.

“The human right to science,” she said, “includes the right to transparency.”

For the first two of these conferences, the INC Secretariat didn’t include the participants’ affiliations when they released the list of people who had registered for the event, making it hard to tell who worked for the industry. That has since changed, making it easier for advocacy groups to scour lists for fossil fuel and chemical company affiliations.

After the UN released the roster of the 4,000 people who had registered for Ottawa this year, the Center for International Environmental Law released its analysis of industry attendees. It found about 200 people with observer-level badges.

What’s more, the group said, 16 industry representatives had received the red badges usually reserved for government delegates. They were invited onto official delegations by China, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and Uganda. I later learned an Indonesian delegate was listed as part of its Ministry of Industry; LinkedIn revealed him to be a director at a petrochemical firm.

I reached out to officials from all 10 countries. Most did not respond.

(The United States wasn’t on the list. “As a matter of policy, the United States does not include any industry or civil society representatives in our official delegation,” said a spokesperson from the State Department.)

There is “no such thing as conflict of interest in International negotiations,” the executive director of the Uganda National Environment Management Authority, Barirega Akankwasah, told me in a WhatsApp message. It’s “a matter of country positions and not individual positions,” he said, adding that the conference was “open and transparent” and stakeholders were “all welcome to participate.”

An official from the Dominican Republic, Claudia Taboada, told me that environmental groups and academic scientists had been consulted before the Ottawa conference and that the two industry reps on the country’s eight-member delegation had restricted privileges. They were barred from internal meetings where observers weren’t allowed, she said, and they couldn’t negotiate on behalf of the government.

Those industry reps weren’t trying to influence the government’s position, added Taboada, who is director for science, technology and environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I found that hard to believe. Who would sit through days of bureaucratic meetings just to observe?

A red-striped badge provides tangible benefits, multiple attendees told me, like access to email lists and WhatsApp chats that are closed to observers. A university scientist who’s part of Fiji’s official delegation, Rufino Varea, said it’s easier to talk to official delegates from other countries when you have that badge. It shows only a person’s name and country, making it impossible to tell at a glance whether someone works for the government or for private interests.

A press release issued that day showed a counter-analysis of the entire list of attendees from the International Council of Chemical Associations, which said that industry observers were vastly outnumbered by more than 2,000 members from nongovernmental organizations like environmental advocacy groups.

Many of these groups are “incredibly well funded” and supported by billionaires, said a subsequent email from the American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest plastics lobby. It noted that at least eight countries had NGO representatives on their official delegations.

For every NGO with millions in the bank, there were others whose members couldn’t afford the trip to Ottawa. Many had to compete for limited travel funds from sources like the UN or larger advocacy groups.

I sat down with John Chweya, a friendly man in a leather jacket who makes a living as a waste picker in Kenya. A single salad at the conference cost more than a day’s pay.

As president of the Waste Pickers Association of Kenya, he wanted delegates to understand how plastic impacts the millions around the world who collect garbage and sort the recyclables they can sell in places without formal waste disposal. Toxic fumes from plastic burning in landfills make his fellow workers sick, he told me. They wake up with swollen necks, joints that don’t work and mysterious tumors. Chweya wants the world to make less plastic; he came to Ottawa to fight for protective gear and health care.

The specificity of his story brought home how the experiences of front-line communities could inform the understanding of the plastics crisis.

Others like Chweya tried to give voice to huge portions of the world’s populations that are suffering from every step in the plastic life cycle: residents of Indigenous communities and Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” breathing dangerous plant emissions; Pacific Islanders seeing their coral reefs entangled in abandoned fishing nets; activists from lower-income countries that are swimming in Americans’ discarded plastic.

I watched them trying to grab the attention of government officials with handwritten posters, events in cramped rooms and limited speaking slots during the plenary.

None of it matched the flash of the billboards I could not seem to avoid, which heralded their own impending health emergency.

These plastics save lives, one decreed, featuring a girl in a hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask.

Negotiators couldn’t even agree on setting voluntary reductions for plastic production, I thought. Nobody was proposing to eliminate enough plastic to cause hospital shortages.

Chweya called the prevalent ads “traitorous.”

UN officials had warned against the inequities playing out in Ottawa.

In November 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement during the first conference to negotiate the treaty, held in Uruguay.

Even though they weren’t hosting it, human rights officials had advice on how to proceed. “The plastic industry has disproportionate power and influence over policy relative to the general public,” they wrote. “Clear boundaries on conflict of interest should be established … drawing from existing good practices under international law.”

They recommended policies similar to those adopted by the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a separate UN treaty. Government representatives meet every two years to evaluate results. Recognizing that the tobacco industry’s presence was fundamentally incompatible with protecting public health, the countries agreed to virtually ban Big Tobacco from those meetings.

“It is irresponsible and inaccurate to liken plastics to tobacco,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement in response to my questions about this comparison. “Unlike the tobacco industry, the plastics industry is playing a vital role in helping meet the UN’s sustainability goals by contributing to food safety, healthcare, renewable energy, telecommunications, clean drinking water, and much more. …

“Keeping plastic producers out means a less informed treaty,” the council said. “We are essential and constructive stakeholders in the global effort to prevent plastic pollution.”

Short of barring the plastics industry, many have wondered why the UN can’t start with smaller steps, like giving industry observers a different kind of badge.

The fossil fuel companies “that are manufacturing plastics” are “not coming to these negotiations with solutions,” Baskut Tuncak, a former UN special rapporteur for human rights and toxics, told me. They’re here “to throw a wrench in the process, or two, or three.”

When I asked if it intended to introduce conflict-of-interest controls, the INC Secretariat said it couldn’t impose rules unilaterally. Governments would have to decide for themselves.

Some U.S. and European politicians have requested such reforms. Negotiators should consider measures “to protect against undue influence of corporate actors with proven vested interests that contradict the goals of the global plastics treaty,” said a letter last month sent to President Joe Biden and the secretary-general of the United Nations.

It was signed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who’s often criticized the fossil fuel industry’s influence on public policy, along with 11 other members of Congress and a member of the European Parliament. Industry reps should be required to disclose lobbying records and campaign contributions, the letter suggested.

The UN isn’t powerless, said Tuncak and Ana Paula Souza, a UN human rights officer I met on my last day in Ottawa. There’s more the institution could do to raise the profile of the issue, they said. Souza said the UN could also increase funding to allow more of those most affected by plastic pollution to attend these meetings.

The Ottawa conference ended with limited progress. Negotiators have a long way to go to reach a final draft at the last scheduled conference this November in Busan, South Korea. Smaller groups of delegates will meet before then; it’s unclear how many observers will be able to attend.

It’s tempting to feel pessimistic. This could easily end up like the UN climate treaty — anemic, voluntary and dragging on forever.

And it’s not like a conflict-of-interest policy would magically solve everything. Countries with powerful plastics lobbies, including the United States, can still advocate for corporate interests.

But it’s worth stepping back to recognize the magnitude of what’s happening.

Nearly every government on Earth signed up for days of painstaking sessions on plastic as a global threat — even places confronting existential crises, like Haiti, Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine. The world recognizes the importance of figuring this out. And despite all the industry influence, capping plastic production remains a possibility.

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lisa Song.

A case in point is the work of the UN’s “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (GHREN), appointed to investigate alleged violations in the country in the period since April 2018. The date is chosen because it marked the start of violent protests, which quickly turned into an attempted coup d’état. The violence lasted for three months and left over 250 people dead, including opponents of the government, government officials and sympathizers, and 22 police officers.

The group’s first report, in February of 2024, ran to 300 pages. It appeared to be very detailed: for example, it included a 9-page case study of events in one Nicaraguan city, Masaya, during the period April-July 2018. Yet despite this detail, the GHREN ignored the assignment which had been set for its work, which explicitly required it to investigate “all” relevant events. The report either omitted completely, or mentioned only very briefly, the many extreme acts of violence by those involved in the coup attempt. Instead, it focused only on alleged human rights violations by government officials and, in collecting evidence, the group gave preferential access to a number of NGOs which are highly critical of the Nicaraguan government.

The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, a group made up of organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada, Europe and Latin America, including Nicaragua itself, responded in detail to the GHREN’s work. Its letter calling for the report to be withdrawn was signed by prominent human rights experts, 85 different organizations and over 450 individuals. Despite the number of people who were in support, the letter and detailed evidence submitted received no response whatever.

Indeed, the GHREN continued its work, and in February of 2024 published a further report, this time without even passing mention of opposition violence. It made no reference to the Coalition’s submissions: it was as if the criticisms of the first report and the evidence substantiating them never existed.

As one of the human rights experts who was critical of the first report by the GHREN, and as one of the organizers of the Coalition response, we have worked together to produce a second letter, which has been sent to the GHREN and to the President and senior officials of the UN Human Rights Council. This new letter says that the latest report is “methodologically flawed, biased and should never have been published.”  It contends that “excluding pertinent information submitted to the study group is a breach of responsible methodology, a violation of the ethos of every judicial or quasi-judicial investigation.” The letter is signed by ten prominent human rights experts and activists, 47 organizations and over 250 individuals in Nicaragua, USA and Europe, many with long experience in Nicaragua.  (The Coalition is continuing to collect signatures, which will be sent in follow-up at a later date.)

What is wrong with the GHREN’s latest report? Many examples of bias and omissions can be found within its 19 pages. One is its reference to the amnesty announced by the Nicaraguan government in 2019 for those detained and found guilty of crimes, including even homicide, during the coup attempt. The amnesty was an outcome of negotiations with the Catholic Church and others, aimed at achieving reconciliation in the aftermath of the coup attempt. However, the GHREN portrays the amnesty as benefiting only the state itself, when, in fact, its main beneficiaries were more than 400 opposition figures, including coup organizers, who had been convicted of violent offences. One of the most prominent beneficiaries, Medardo Mairena, had organized several murderous attacks on police stations: the worst, in the small town of Morrito, led to five deaths and nine police officers being kidnapped and beaten. Despite his crimes, Mairena was portrayed as a victim by the GHREN: he was even one of the opposition figures invited to address the UN Human Rights Council in July of 2023.

A second example is the report’s treatment of migration. Initially, the report claimed that 935,065 people had left Nicaragua; i.e., that one in eight of the population had “fled the country since 2018.” This was the figure that received publicity, even though it was absurdly high. Within a few days the GHREN realized their mistake and revised their report, so that the version currently on the website says instead that 271,740 Nicaraguans have become asylum seekers and 18,545 Nicaraguans are recognized as refugees worldwide (fewer than 1 in 20 of the population). But the report still gives no attention to the evidence that most migration from Nicaragua in the past five years has been economic in motivation, given the effects of US coercive measures on the country, and the economic downturns which resulted from the coup attempt itself and from the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic. It also takes no account of the fact that many migrants return to Nicaragua after periods of working abroad. In other words, even the lower figure likely exaggerates the numbers of Nicaraguans who (in the report’s original words) “fled the country.”

The most egregious bias in the report is its treatment of opposition figures as victims. Yes, it is true that there have been arrests, imprisonments and the expulsion from the country (with US agreement and facilitation) of many of those arrested. But the GHREN’s report assumes that those affected are innocent of any crime and are merely being persecuted as opponents of the government. It feeds the narrative of Washington, its allies and corporate media that what happened in 2018 was peaceful protest, when in practice the violent coup attempt affected millions of Nicaraguans, with lives lost, public buildings destroyed, homes set on fire and scores of government officials and sympathizers kidnapped, tortured, wounded or killed. The GHREN ignored the plentiful, detailed evidence from the Coalition which presented a more accurate narrative of what happened.

It is vital that the UN Human Rights Council pay attention to these criticisms and thoroughly review its dealings with Nicaragua. It is clear that the current expert group has totally failed in its assignment to consider “all” relevant events since April 2018 and is behaving in a completely unprofessional manner. Its work should be stopped, and a genuine attempt should be made to work with the Nicaraguan government based on a proper understanding of the needs of its people and of their experience of the 2018 coup attempt. Above all, it should urge the removal of the unilateral coercive measures (wrongly referred to as “sanctions”, implying that they are legitiamte), which are worsening conditions for Nicaraguans, not improving them.

Coda by Alfred de Zayas

The dysfunctional situation described above is not without precedent.  During my six years as Independent Expert on International Order (2012-18), I myself observed manipulations and double standards, and duly informed the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) that in my considered opinion some of my colleague rapporteurs were not rigorously observing their independent status and our code of conduct, particularly Article 6, which requires all rapporteurs to give due weight to all available information and to pro-actively seek explanations from all stakeholders, including the government of the state in questions, respecting the over-arching rule of audiatur et altera pars (“let the other side be heard as well”).

When in the summer of 2017 I sought an invitation to visit Venezuela on official mission, I encountered opposition within OHCHR, which attempted to dissuade me.  When I did receive an invitation, thus breaking a 21-year absence of UN rapporteurs from Venezuela, I was surprised to receive letters from three major NGOs who actually asked me not to go, because I was not the “pertinent” rapporteur.  Evidently these NGOs and some officials at OHCHR were “concerned” with my independence, as already demonstrated in 12 reports to the General Assembly and Human Rights Council,  and feared accordingly, that I would write my own report on Venezuela, which  would not necessarily support the ubiquitous US narrative.

It became clear to me that some officials at OHCHR were nervous that I would actually conduct a fair investigation, speak to all stakeholders on the ground and then make my own judgment.  Indeed, I read and digested all the relevant reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. When I was on the ground in Venezuela I fact-checked these and other reports, which I found to be seriously deficient.  I also consulted the reports of local non-governmental organizations in Venezuela, including those of Fundalatin, Grupo Sures and Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, and read the economic analysis by the Venezuelan Professor Pasqualina Curcio.

When in November/December 2017 I became the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, I was subjected to pre-mission, during-mission, and post-mission mobbing.  I endured a barrage of insults and even death threats.  Notwithstanding an atmosphere of intimidation, my mission resulted in positive results, including the immediate release of opposition politician Roberto Picon (his wife and son appealed to me, I then submitted the case to the then Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza), the release of 80 other detainees, enhanced cooperation between UN agencies and the government, and new memoranda of understanding. The mission opened the door to the visits of several other rapporteurs including Professors Alena Douhan and Michael Fakhri, as well as by High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet.  My report to the Human Rights Council in September 2018 addressed the root causes of problems, formulated proposals for solutions, incorporating the information received from all stakeholders, including the opposition parliamentarians, Chamber of Commerce, the press, diplomatic corps, church leaders, university professors, students and more than 40 NGOs of all colors.  The report was criticized by mainstream NGOs in the US and Europe, for whom only those rapporteurs are praiseworthy who engage in “naming and shaming” and promote regime change.

Chapters 2 and 3 of my book The Human Rights Industry document the endemic problems in the functioning of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council that continue to cater to the priorities of the major donors.  However, the general perception of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council promoted by the mainstream media gratuitously grants both institutions authority and credibility, without addressing the problems already exposed by a number of rapporteurss, including myself.

This dependence of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council on Washington and Brussels explains some of the abstruse decisions and resolutions adopted by the Council.  Part of the problem lies in the ways in which staff members are recruited and in the procedures by which experts, including rapporteurs, independent experts and commission members, are appointed.

For example, it does not advance “geographical representation” simply by hiring someone from Mauritius or Indonesia, if that person has been trained and indoctrinated in US and UK universities.  “Geographical diversity” does not necessarily ensure the representation of a spectrum of opinions and approaches to problems.  It does not mean much when there are so and so many persons who are ticked off against a particular nationality; e.g., US, French, Russian, Chinese, South African.  What is crucial is to ensure that all schools of legal thinking and philosophy are represented.  What is important is that when a candidate from State X is recruited or appointed, that he/she have first and foremost the interests of the United Nations at heart, and that he/she is not a priori committed to support the interests of the US or one of the European powers. I do not challenge the competence or expertise of staff members and rapporteurs – I challenge their ethos and independence — their commitment to the values of the UN Charter and their commitment to impartiality.

There are other obstacles to impartiality. Indeed, some OHCHR staff members are penalized if they do their work properly and do NOT follow the orders coming from above, which are mostly US-Brussels friendly.  It is a regrettable reality that the donors weigh heavily in setting the agenda. There is no mechanism to ensure that the code of conduct of rapporteurs is respected, in particular Article 6.  The impunity for openly siding with the US and Brussels and ignoring the rest of the world is notorious.  In other words, OHCHR and the Human Rights Council have been largely “hijacked” – as indeed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights have been.  This raises the issue that Juvenalis formulated in his sixth Satire (verses 346-7): Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – “who will guard over the guardians?”

Experience shows that being a solid professional does NOT facilitate getting a promotion.  One is likely to be penalized.  Abiding by the “unwritten law” of “groupthink” and supporting the Western narratives does contribute to career development. And, alas, most staffers are first and foremost interested in their careers, and not necessarily in promoting human rights.  As elsewhere, it is a job.

Some outside observers have understood what game is being played and what the rules are.  Reality at OHCHR and the Human Rights Council is closer to Machiavellianism and Orwellianism than to the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik, P.C. Chang and others.  Notwithstanding these problems, we are optimistic that the system can be reformed, and we encourage all non-governmental people of good will and good faith to insist on reforming these institutions so that they serve all of humanity and not only the interests of a handful of powerful states.  Among the NGOs that are making concrete proposals for reform are the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities and the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, both in consultative status with the United Nations.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alfred de Zayas and John Perry.

The post carried an image of Kim with a fake quote superimposed on it. The image of Kim cited by the claim was actually released in September 2017 with a statement criticizing then-U.S. President Donald Trump. No part of his statement matches what the head of the medical association said.

The claim was shared on South Korea’s popular online forum Ppomppu, with more than 2.6 million members on Feb. 22.

“Direct challenge, stern warning … I’ve seen similar comments before quite often,” the claim reads.

The post was accompanied by three images. 

The first two images at the top show what appears to be Kim Taek-woo, interim head of South Korea’s largest medical association, speaking at a press conference. 

A caption under the photos reads: “If even a single doctor is penalized in terms of their license in relation to this incident, we will regard this as a direct challenge against doctors and sternly warn that we may enter into action that will be difficult to handle.”

The third image shows Kim Jong Un, with wording under it saying: “We regard this as a direct challenge and sternly warn that we may enter into action that will be difficult to handle.”

Some social media users noted the similarity of remarks and accused Kim Taek-woo of being under North Korean influence. 

“He is a pinko,” one user wrote, using a derogatory term to refer to North Korean or communist sympathizers.

“Seems like he was coached [by North Korea],” another user said. 

The claim spread amid a major protest by medical personnel in South Korea led by the medical association and other groups. Thousands of South Korean doctors have resigned to protest a government proposal to raise the medical school enrollment quota to address shortages and an aging population. 

These striking trainees ignored a government ultimatum set for Feb. 29 to resume work or face legal consequences. Subsequently, on March 5, the government announced its intention to begin notifying the striking medical professionals that their licenses would be suspended.

Kim Jong Un’s remarks

A Google reverse image search found the photo of Kim Jong Un corresponds to one released by North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency on Sept. 22, 2017. 

An identical photo was also published by Reuters that day.

“North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un makes a statement regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s speech at the U.N. general assembly, in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang September 22, 2017,” reads the caption of the photo. 

At that time Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” and branded the North Korean leader “Rocket Man.”

A review of the statement, published by KCNA in both English and Korean, found no part matching the caption seen in the image cited by social media posts. 

Kim Taek-woo’s remarks

A keyword search on Google found that Kim Taek-woo did make such remarks during a press briefing on Feb. 17 in response to warnings by the South Korean government it may cancel protesting doctors' medical licenses if they did not return to work.

The clip of the briefing was published by the South Korean broadcaster YTN on Feb. 17.

The corresponding part begins at the 22-second mark of the clip.

Other South Korean news reports also featured his statement as seen here and here.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab, or AFCL, was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

The post UN’s Forest Protection Goals at Risk, Say Independent Assessors appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Photograph Source: Leif Jørgensen – CC BY-SA 4.0

A United Nations (UN) report recently emerged making damning claims of sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. But not all is as it seems. The report has some glaring epistemological problems, all of which seem to serve the Israeli narrative that its genocide in Gaza is somehow justified. Moreover, the report fits within a wider modus operandi on the part of the world’s preeminent international institution. A more comprehensive examination of the history of the UN’s role in the conflict in Palestine reveals its supposed pro-Palestinian bias is not as clearcut as it’s commonly presented. Indeed, there is evidence that the UN has, if anything, been more a tool of Israel than the other way round.

Shocking accusations swiftly weaponized by Israel

The UN released the report on March 4^th, almost six months after the surprise October 7^th attack when members of Hamas’ paramilitary wing breached the Gaza border. Co-authored by its special envoy on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the document claims there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attack. Patten gave a statement in which she said that this took place in “at least three locations” including “the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”

The following day, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, publicly condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supposedly failing to respond in an adequate manner. Specifically, he criticized Guterres for failing to immediately call for a UN Security Council meeting about the report’s findings. However, as multiple media outlets have pointed out, Guterres does not have the authority to convene a General Assembly meeting. A UN spokesperson responded that “in no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to keep the report ‘quiet.’” She added that Katz’s announcement was made a matter of hours before a press conference about the report’s contents was scheduled to be held.

Recalling UN ambassador and launching ‘hasbara’ propaganda campaign

Israel has also withdrawn its ambassador to the UN, claiming that the organization’s leadership is attempting to “silence” the allegations. Katz said in a statement: “”I [have] ordered our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, to return to Israel for immediate consultations regarding the attempt to keep quiet the serious UN report on the mass rapes committed by Hamas and its helpers on Oct. 7.”

Nonetheless, there are already signs that the Israeli government is seizing on the report as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign to deflect criticism from its committal of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. On March 7^th, The Jerusalem Postreported that Katz, “has directed all embassies within the State of Israel to begin a large-scale hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign immediately… in light of the findings of the UN report on sexual violence in the Hamas massacre on October 7.”

An inversion of the Israeli narrative about the UN

The development represents an inversion of what Israel and Western media commonly characterize as the usual dynamic between the UN and the various parties to the conflict in Palestine. According to this narrative, the UN has a viciously anti-Israel agenda and consistently singles out Israel for criticism. Indeed, hardline Zionists have long complained that the UN is “biased” or even prejudiced against Israel, which often goes alongside the usual conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

One US-based Israel supporter even set up an NGO called “UN Watch,” which according to its executive director “holds the UN to account” for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Indeed, we will presumably soon hear an Israeli narrative that presents the fact that the UN has produced such a report in spite of such a bias as the most definitive proof possible that its findings are correct. But a deeper investigation shows that the report is, in fact, deeply flawed in both its methods and conclusions.

A compendium of unverified anecdotes and repetition of Israeli lies

It has already emerged, for instance, that the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7^th. Rather, they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel. According to CNN, the UN team met with a total of 33 Israeli institutions. One of these was a “search and rescue” organization that has previously been accused of spreading misinformation about the October 7^th Hamas attack. This same organization, for example, had earlier claimed that it found a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach in an apparent attack on her fetus, which turned out to be unverified.

Foreign Policy magazine pointed out that the report furthermore “did not attribute the sexual violence to any specific armed group.” In other words, even if the allegations are true, they could have been committed by Palestinians (or, indeed, non-Palestinians) who were not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian paramilitary organization. Foreign Policy added that “the U.N. team behind the report had not been tasked with an investigative mission” and that “[s]uch attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.”

A similar story plays out at The New York Times

The report was released in the same week that it emerged that significant sections of a New York Times article published in December of last year, which contained similar claims, were in fact false. The story, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.,” claimed that members of the Be’eri kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza border had been raped by Hamas assailants during the course of the October 7^th attack.

But The Intercept reported on March 7^th that at least two of the three women “were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” according to a spokesperson of the kibbutz. The Intercept article adds that some of the initial reports about sexual violence came from an anonymous paramedic who had been connected to the international media by a representative of the Israeli government (which, of course, makes this person’s testimony highly suspect). It also states that the kibbutz spokesperson herself “disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.”

Not an isolated incident, but the latest chapter in a long history

Neither the UN report nor the erroneous New York Times article would be the first cases of Western institutions or its corporate-owned media spreading misinformation on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, there is a long history of The New York Times specifically taking orders from the Israeli government and its NGO proxies in the Israel lobby. In 2014, for example, the Times deliberately failed to report on the arrest of a Palestinian journalist by Israeli authorities because Israel had ordered it to do so. In 2022, the Timesfired a Palestinian photographer on its staff at the behest of the pro-Israel NGO Honest Reporting.

Even when there is no direct evidence of Israeli intervention, leadership of mainstream corporate media across the West seem to have an almost automatic tendency to sideline, silence and/or fire any of its staff who fail to toe the pro-Israel line. In 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for making a pro-Palestinian remark at a UN meeting held on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Washington-based publication The Hill sacked Katie Halper in 2022 after she described Israel as an apartheid state (a charge that has become mainstream even within Israel). And the UK’s Guardian newspaper fired Nathan J. Robinson in 2021 after he posted a satirical comment about the US’s military funding to Israel on social media.

Countless resolutions but never any concrete sanction

As for the UN, though there have been many resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, the organization has seldom imposed any concrete punitive measures against the country in response. Indeed, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the reason why the UN keeps issuing so many resolutions condemning Israel is because Israel (with the encouragement of its backers in Washington) simply ignores them and continues to violate Palestinian human rights and international law.

In any case, it is the UN General Assembly, rather than the UN’s leadership or staff, that usually issues these condemnations. The UN General Assembly is made up of representatives of governments around the world and so is more representative of global public opinion than the UN’s internal bureaucracy. In any case, General Assembly resolutions can be vetoed by permanent members of the UN Security Council. Since one of those permanent members is the United States (whose number one ally is Israel), it always vetoes any resolution that condemns Israel anyway.

UN staff slammed by leadership when critical of Israel

Even when UN officials themselves criticize Israel, they sometimes do so only to get silenced or sidelined by the UN’s hierarchy. For instance, international relations scholar at Princeton University Richard Falk served for decades as a UN expert on the conflict in Palestine. Yet his work has often been thwarted by figures within the UN leadership and administration.

In 2017, for example, Falk published a report on Israel’s human rights violations through the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). The head of UNESCWA, Rima Khalaf, said that the report represented the first time that any UN report has “clearly and frankly conclude[d] that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.”

The fact that Israel is practicing apartheid in the occupied territories is so obvious that former US president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, have said so. Even some figures from Israel’s own political, military, intelligence, and legal elite have said so too.  Yet in spite of this, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that Khalaf withdraw Falk’s report.

Legitimizing the two-state charade while deplatforming the one-state alternative

Another way that the UN subtly serves the Israeli narrative is its elevation of a two-state solution as the best, and indeed only, means of resolving the conflict. Every resolution passed by the UN General Assembly calling for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is predicated on one Israeli state and one Palestinian state divided by the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 war. This would deliver to Israel 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine while leaving the Palestinians with the remaining 22%. In addition to giving the two sides a completely unfair share of the land (especially considering the rough parity in population numbers), this division would also reward the Zionist landgrab and subsequent ethnic cleansing that took place in the latter half of the 1940s.

The traditional solution that was proffered by all Palestinian nationalist parties before the 1993 Oslo accord, meanwhile, (that is, a single, secular, non-sectarian democratic state with equal rights for all encompassing the whole of historic Palestine) has been systematically suppressed and deplatformed by the UN’s leadership. Former official Craig Mokhiber was essentially forced to resign for reasons of conscience before publicly voicing his support for the rival one-state solution – again highlighting how the UN hierarchy sidelines those who it considers too pro-Palestinian.

In a public letter published just as he resigned, Mokhiber stated that the two-state solution has become an “open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” During a media interview shortly after he added: “When people [who work at the UN] are not talking from official talking points, you hear increasingly about a one-state solution.”

The two-state smokescreen

This deliberate deplatforming of the one-state solution and narrow focus on its two-state rival serves an important purpose for Israel. Though Israel opposes even the resolutions in favor of two states (presumably because they insist that such a settlement should be based on internationally recognized borders), it nonetheless benefits from the elevation of the two-state solution. This is because it creates a convenient smokescreen for Israel to deliberately stall on making peace while continuing to displace Palestinians in the West Bank, establish settlements in their place, and build infrastructure for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers – all of which is illegal under international law.

Israel does this as part of a duplicitous sleight of hand in which it publicly proclaims support for a two-state solution while simultaneously itself creating a situation on the ground that makes that solution impossible. It does this for the simple reason that the goal of Zionism from the outset has been the establishment of a Jewish-majority state encompassing all of historic Palestine with the Palestinians ethnically cleansed out of it. As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky puts it in A Land With A People, “the settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise Palestine’ and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.”

Time to rethink the role of the UN

Given the UN’s role in providing cover for the continuation of this process all while posturing as the primary locomotive toward peace, it is high time that Palestinians and their supporters stop looking up to it as a source of truth and meaningful condemnation of Israel’s human rights violations. Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.

The post New Report on Sexual Violence During October 7th Attack Raises Serious Questions About the UN’s Supposed Anti-Israel Bias appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bolton.

Shocking accusations swiftly weaponized by Israel

The UN released the report on March 4, almost six months after the surprise October 7 attack when members of Hamas’ paramilitary wing breached the Gaza border. Co-authored by its special envoy on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the document claims there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attack. Patten gave a statement in which she said that this took place in “at least three locations” including “the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”

The following day, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, publicly condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supposedly failing to respond in an adequate manner. Specifically, he criticized Guterres for failing to immediately call for a UN Security Council meeting about the report’s findings. However, as multiple media outlets have pointed out, Guterres does not have the authority to convene a General Assembly meeting. A UN spokesperson responded that “in no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to keep the report ‘quiet.’” She added that Katz’s announcement was made a matter of hours before a press conference about the report’s contents was scheduled to be held.

Recalling UN ambassador and launching ‘hasbara’ propaganda campaign

Israel has also withdrawn its ambassador to the UN, claiming that the organization’s leadership is attempting to “silence” the allegations. Katz said in a statement: “”I [have] ordered our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, to return to Israel for immediate consultations regarding the attempt to keep quiet the serious UN report on the mass rapes committed by Hamas and its helpers on Oct. 7.”

Nonetheless, there are already signs that the Israeli government is seizing on the report as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign to deflect criticism from its committal of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. On March 7, the Jerusalem Post reported that Katz, “has directed all embassies within the State of Israel to begin a large-scale hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign immediately… in light of the findings of the UN report on sexual violence in the Hamas massacre on October 7.”

An inversion of the Israeli narrative about the UN

The development represents an inversion of what Israel and Western media commonly characterize as the usual dynamic between the UN and the various parties to the conflict in Palestine. According to this narrative, the UN has a viciously anti-Israel agenda and consistently singles out Israel for criticism. Indeed, hardline Zionists have long complained that the UN is “biased” or even prejudiced against Israel, which often goes alongside the usual conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

One US-based Israel supporter even set up an NGO called “UN Watch,” which according to its executive director “holds the UN to account” for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Indeed, we will presumably soon hear an Israeli narrative that presents the fact that the UN has produced such a report in spite of such a bias as the most definitive proof possible that its findings are correct. But a deeper investigation shows that the report is, in fact, deeply flawed in both its methods and conclusions.

A compendium of unverified anecdotes and repetition of Israeli lies

It has already emerged, for instance, that the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7. Rather, they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel. According to CNN, the UN team met with a total of 33 Israeli institutions. One of these was a “search and rescue” organization that has previously been accused of spreading misinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack. This same organization, for example, had earlier claimed that it found a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach in an apparent attack on her fetus, which turned out to be unverified.

Foreign Policy magazine pointed out that the report furthermore “did not attribute the sexual violence to any specific armed group.” In other words, even if the allegations are true, they could have been committed by Palestinians (or, indeed, non-Palestinians) who were not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian paramilitary organization. Foreign Policy added that “the U.N. team behind the report had not been tasked with an investigative mission” and that “[s]uch attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.”

A similar story plays out at the New York Times

The report was released in the same week that it emerged that significant sections of a New York Times article published in December of last year, which contained similar claims, were in fact false. The story, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.,” claimed that members of the Be’eri kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza border had been raped by Hamas assailants during the course of the October 7 attack.

But The Intercept reported on March 7 that at least two of the three women “were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” according to a spokesperson of the kibbutz. The Intercept article adds that some of the initial reports about sexual violence came from an anonymous paramedic who had been connected to the international media by a representative of the Israeli government (which, of course, makes this person’s testimony highly suspect). It also states that the kibbutz spokesperson herself “disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.”

Not an isolated incident, but the latest chapter in a long history

Neither the UN report nor the erroneous New York Times article would be the first cases of Western institutions or its corporate-owned media spreading misinformation on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, there is a long history of The New York Times specifically taking orders from the Israeli government and its NGO proxies in the Israel lobby. In 2014, for example, the Times deliberately failed to report on the arrest of a Palestinian journalist by Israeli authorities because Israel had ordered it to do so. In 2022, the Times fired a Palestinian photographer on its staff at the behest of the pro-Israel NGO Honest Reporting.

Even when there is no direct evidence of Israeli intervention, leadership of mainstream corporate media across the West seem to have an almost automatic tendency to sideline, silence and/or fire any of its staff who fail to toe the pro-Israel line. In 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for making a pro-Palestinian remark at a UN meeting held on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Washington-based publication The Hill sacked Katie Halper in 2022 after she described Israel as an apartheid state (a charge that has become mainstream even within Israel). And the UK’s Guardian newspaper fired Nathan J. Robinson in 2021 after he posted a satirical comment about the US’s military funding to Israel on social media.

Countless resolutions but never any concrete sanction

As for the UN, though there have been many resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, the organization has seldom imposed any concrete punitive measures against the country in response. Indeed, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the reason why the UN keeps issuing so many resolutions condemning Israel is because Israel (with the encouragement of its backers in Washington) simply ignores them and continues to violate Palestinian human rights and international law.

In any case, it is the UN General Assembly, rather than the UN’s leadership or staff, that usually issues these condemnations. The UN General Assembly is made up of representatives of governments around the world and so is more representative of global public opinion than the UN’s internal bureaucracy. In any case, General Assembly resolutions can be vetoed by permanent members of the UN Security Council. Since one of those permanent members is the United States (whose number one ally is Israel), it always vetoes any resolution that condemns Israel anyway.

UN staff slammed by leadership when critical of Israel

Even when UN officials themselves criticize Israel, they sometimes do so only to get silenced or sidelined by the UN’s hierarchy. For instance, international relations scholar at Princeton University Richard Falk served for decades as a UN expert on the conflict in Palestine. Yet his work has often been thwarted by figures within the UN leadership and administration.

In 2017, for example, Falk published a report on Israel’s human rights violations through the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). The head of UNESCWA, Rima Khalaf, said that the report represented the first time that any UN report has “clearly and frankly conclude[d] that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.”

The fact that Israel is practicing apartheid in the occupied territories is so obvious that former US president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, have said so. Even some figures from Israel’s own political, military, intelligence, and legal elite have said so too.  Yet in spite of this, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that Khalaf withdraw Falk’s report.

Legitimizing the two-state charade while deplatforming the one-state alternative

Another way that the UN subtly serves the Israeli narrative is its elevation of a two-state solution as the best, and indeed only, means of resolving the conflict. Every resolution passed by the UN General Assembly calling for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is predicated on one Israeli state and one Palestinian state divided by the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 war. This would deliver to Israel 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine while leaving the Palestinians with the remaining 22%. In addition to giving the two sides a completely unfair share of the land (especially considering the rough parity in population numbers), this division would also reward the Zionist landgrab and subsequent ethnic cleansing that took place in the latter half of the 1940s.

The traditional solution that was proffered by all Palestinian nationalist parties before the 1993 Oslo accord, meanwhile, (that is, a single, secular, non-sectarian democratic state with equal rights for all encompassing the whole of historic Palestine) has been systematically suppressed and deplatformed by the UN’s leadership. Former official Craig Mokhiber was essentially forced to resign for reasons of conscience before publicly voicing his support for the rival one-state solution – again highlighting how the UN hierarchy sidelines those who it considers too pro-Palestinian.

In a public letter published just as he resigned, Mokhiber stated that the two-state solution has become an “open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” During a media interview shortly after he added: “When people [who work at the UN] are not talking from official talking points, you hear increasingly about a one-state solution.”

The two-state smokescreen

This deliberate deplatforming of the one-state solution and narrow focus on its two-state rival serves an important purpose for Israel. Though Israel opposes even the resolutions in favor of two states (presumably because they insist that such a settlement should be based on internationally recognized borders), it nonetheless benefits from the elevation of the two-state solution. This is because it creates a convenient smokescreen for Israel to deliberately stall on making peace while continuing to displace Palestinians in the West Bank, establish settlements in their place, and build infrastructure for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers – all of which is illegal under international law.

Israel does this as part of a duplicitous sleight of hand in which it publicly proclaims support for a two-state solution while simultaneously itself creating a situation on the ground that makes that solution impossible. It does this for the simple reason that the goal of Zionism from the outset has been the establishment of a Jewish-majority state encompassing all of historic Palestine with the Palestinians ethnically cleansed out of it. As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky puts it in A Land With A People, “the settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise Palestine’ and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.”

Time to rethink the role of the UN

Given the UN’s role in providing cover for the continuation of this process all while posturing as the primary locomotive toward peace, it is high time that Palestinians and their supporters stop looking up to it as a source of truth and meaningful condemnation of Israel’s human rights violations. Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Bolton.

One Feb. 29 photo of a groundbreaking ceremony shows Kim walking on a red carpet lined with soldiers at attention with the black passenger vans in the background. 

Another shows the four of the vans bearing the Ford logo on the front driving behind a luxury black sedan. 

The vehicles appear to be fourth generation Ford Transit vans that have been manufactured in North America since 2021. The photos didn’t show any passengers in the vans.

A 2013 U.N. sanctions resolution bans the import of luxury cars into North Korea. Another U.N. resolution in 2017 banned the import of all means of transportation.

But it’s widely believed that luxury goods are still being smuggled into North Korea.

T.R. Reid, director of corporate and public policy communications for Ford, told Radio Free Asia that Ford “fully complies” with sanctions against North Korea and other countries, and “doesn’t provide products or services in, to or through agents of the country.”

“How these vehicles were procured for use in and brought to North Korea is unknown,” he said.

In January 2023, a vehicle presumed to be a Mercedes-Benz Maybach GLS 600 belonging to Kim was revealed in images from North Korea’s Korean Central Television. 

And at the end of last year, Kim and other top North Korean officials were seen arriving at Party Central Committee headquarters in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class car.

Allowing the Ford vans to be photographed was a demonstration by Kim that he can still access luxury items from all over the world, said Bruce Bennett, a senior researcher at the Rand Institute.

“American things like a Ford. German things, like a Mercedes,” he said. “He’s basically demonstrating his power and access that his people can get around all of these sanctions.”

Translated by Jisoo Kim. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jisoo Kim for RFA Korean.

At least that’s according to Sung-Yoon Lee, a North Korea expert and fellow at the Wilson Center who late last year released a 304-page biography about the woman he calls “the brains” behind the despotic rule of her brother, a man he says is more interested in basketball.

“She is really the mastermind of this family campaign to expand their influence over South Korea and beyond,” Lee said at a book-signing event hosted by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea at DACOR Bacon House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning.

Lee told the gathering that his book, titled “The Sister: North Korea's Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World,” was years in the making, with his interest piqued by her attendance at her father’s funeral in 2011, when the world knew little about her or her brother.

Even though in Korea, the “proper way to express your sorrow is to really overdo it, to exaggerate and wail away almost deliriously,” Lee said, noting there was an added incentive to do so in the North, Kim Yo Jong “showed genuine, profound sadness” but otherwise felt no need to go further, even when the cameras were trained on her face.

In the years that followed, he said, her always perfectly upright posture, “Mona Lisa smile” and “imperious” demeanor when appearing in public made him more curious about her role leading the hermit kingdom.

“Unfortunately, I see in her eyes a sparkle – intelligence,” he said. “I saw that in Kim Jong Il, too, and in Kim Il Sung, the state founder. They were intelligent; they were not crazy, in the conventional sense.”

“I don't see that sparkle in Kim Jong Un,” he added.

Winter Olympics

The wider world first got to know Kim Yo Jong, believed to be 37 years old, at the February 2018 Winter Olympics in the South Korean city of PyeongChang, which took place in the lead-up to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un’s first meeting in June 2018.

With South and North Korea fielding a united team, Kim Yo Jong was invited to the south to represent Pyongyang in meetings with then-South Korean President Moon Jae-In and to attend the games.

After arriving at Incheon airport “not showing any bit of excitement or happiness that she was there … [almost] as if she had walked into her own living room,” she later attended the games’ opening ceremony, where she was seated directly behind Moon and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who famously chose to “ignore” her presence behind him.

“Throughout the evening, from certain camera angles, it seemed she was lording it over Mike Pence, seated right behind,” Lee said, adding that the visual was sought by North Korea for propaganda reasons.

“Later, I learned that this was not an accident,” he said. “Kim Yo Jong had insisted that she be seated behind them – above President Moon and Vice President Pence – or else ‘We go back home.’” 

“So accommodations were made,” he explained.

The next day, Kim Yo Jong visited Moon at his offices in Seoul and for a short while became “a star” on the world stage, with many seemingly enchanted by the sudden emergence of a female North Korean leader.

More importantly, after months of escalating provocations between her brother and Trump, her message of peace and reconciliation seemed to resonate as more sincere than if it had come from Kim Jong Un.

‘Don’t trust her’

Lee says that is a mistake he hopes to shatter with his biography, arguing Kim Yo Jong will be wheeled out as the friendly face of the North’s global outreach when it once again tries to appear open to compromise. He called for the world not to be fooled.

“She is the No. 2 official in arguably the world's most tyrannical regime,” he added. “What she says, no matter how sweet it may sound, must be questioned and cannot be accepted at face value.”

A switch back to diplomatic niceties after the ongoing round of provocations is as predictable as the plot to Rambo 4, Lee said, noting that “[Rambo] First Blood was a good movie, but by the time you’ve seen Rambo 4, you have a pretty good idea how the movie ends.”

As the true director of North Korea’s propaganda department since 2012, he said, Kim Yo Jong was a skilled political operator, and would be even more at ease on the world stage her second time around.

“People will want to believe in her message, and perhaps even share in the credit that she seeks peace and denuclearization,” Lee said. “Don't trust her. Don't believe everything she says. Don't patronize her.”

“She's not to be underestimated,” he said.

Eventually, Kim Yo Jong may position herself to take over the reins from her brother, even if the current leader’s daughter, Kim Ju Ae, born in 2013, has been slated as the heir apparent in Pyongyang.

“When [Ju Ae] is in her mid-20s, and comes to view her auntie as expendable, cumbersome or even expendable, who knows what will happen?” Lee said. “Who knows who will strike first?”

He cast his mind back to the 2013 state execution of Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong’s uncle, who was accused of trying to seize power following the 2011 death of his brother, Kim Il Jong.

“She will remember that,” he said.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

“The sovereignty of a sovereign state can never be a subject of negotiation, and therefore, we will not sit down with the United States due to this issue,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement, according to North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency Thursday. 

North Korea has long linked its nuclear weapons program to its state identity of self-reliance – Juche ideology – as well as to matters of the nation’s sovereignty. 

“If the U.S.’s definition of ‘peace through strength’ means talking about dialogue upfront while wielding military power behind the curtains, then we must also be prepared for both dialogue and confrontation, especially being more thoroughly prepared for confrontation,” Kim Yo Jong said. “This is our consistent stance towards the U.S.” 

The influential sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un often emerges as the face of Pyongyang’s pressure campaigns, typically delivering hardline messages against the U.S. and its allies. Her appearance on Thursday, her first public statement in about four months, came just days after the U.S. ambassador traded barbs with North Korea’s representative at the U.N. Security Council on Monday. 

North Korean Ambassador Kim Song criticized the U.S. in New York for being hostile to his country, as he defended Pyongyang’s launch of its satellite. North Korea launched its spy satellite last week in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. 

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, however, said that the U.S. and its allies’ joint military exercises – which Pyongyang claims as hostile – are defensive in nature, emphasizing that these exercises cannot justify the North’s violation of Security Council resolutions. She added that Washington wants sincere dialogue with Pyongyang without any preconditions. 

Responding to the U.S. ambassador in the U.N., Kim Yo Jong said that her logic was “weak, fallacious, and shameful,” denying the “sovereign rights of the DPRK,” referring to North Korea’s formal name. 

Kim Yo Jong’s remarks are essentially aimed at preventing regime backers, China and Russia, from deviating from their positions in defending North Korea on the international stage, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul who had advised South Korean governments for years.

“It appears that North Korea’s ultimate strategy is to frame the U.N. Security Council as a domain dominated by what-it-calls the U.S. hegemony. This approach aims to render the Council's functions ineffective and secure a justification for evading sanctions against North Korea,” Yang added.

The sister’s remarks carry a dual message, subtly reiterating Pyongyang’s stance on “conditional” dialogue, the pundit noted. Kim Yo Jong seems to “indirectly suggest the possibility of dialogue with the United States, but only following the abandonment of what North Korea perceives as a hostile policy towards it.”

Edited by Elaine Chan and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Jeong-Ho for RFA.

After North Korea successfully launched a reconnaissance satellite on Nov. 21, the Organization and Guidance Department of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party organized lectures for government officials to explain the satellite’s strategic significance. 

But the bigger news was how they referred to Kim Jong Un and his daughter Ju Ae, who both attended the launch.

“At the lecture … they said that the future of the space power era will thrive under the female general, the Morning Star of Korea,” a resident of the capital Pyongyang told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.  

“This is the first time that the child of the highest dignity was officially called the ‘Morning Star of Korea,’ [a title] which was used to promote the early revolutionary activities of [national founder] Kim Il Sung.”

The progenitor of the Kim Dynasty is said to have been called the “Morning Star of Korea” during the time he was a guerilla leader who fought against Japanese rule of Korea before and during World War II.

The term “morning star” may have been used to describe both Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, at one time or another, but never officially.

That the party is calling Kim Ju Ae as the “Morning Star of Korea,” in the exact way that Kim Il Sung is heralded, seems to suggest a deliberate effort to cast her in a similar light. 

Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather are deeply respected in North Korea even long after their deaths.

Though they may not be best known as the “Morning Star” anymore, posthumously, the birthdays of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il have been designated as holidays and named after other celestial bodies, the Day of the Sun and the Day of the Shining Star. Officially the two leaders are titled as the  “Eternal President,” the “Eternal General Secretary.”

Kim Jong Un as the current leader is referred to by many titles, including “Marshall,” “Supreme Leader,” “Beloved Father,” “General,” or commonly, the “Highest Dignity.”

Evolving title

Kim Ju Ae, who is believed to be about 10 or 11, burst onto the public scene about a year ago when she attended the launch of a new intercontinental ballistic missile. She would make more and more public appearances over the next few months, and state media began referring to her as the “Beloved Child.” 

This title was later upgraded to “Noble Child,” and her rapid rise to prominence caused experts to speculate that it was all an attempt to convey an image of her father as a family man, or that she was being groomed to be his heir.

That the party has conferred the Morning Star of Korea title onto Kim Ju Ae and has called her the “female general” appears to point to the latter.

At the satellite lectures in North Pyongan province, lecturers said that because of the success of the launch, the whole world would look up to the “Morning Star of Korea,” the female general, a resident there said.

“[The lecturer] emphasized that the ‘Highest Dignity’ and the ‘Morning Star of Korea’ are protecting the future of the Republic,” he said. “The expressions on the faces of some officials seemed displeased at the content of the lecture, which idolized a young child as a rising star of North Korea.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, Martin Griffiths highlighted the plight of patients at Gaza City’s embattled Al-Shifa hospital, amid reports that medics have been trying to keep newborns warm in swaddling blankets because power for incubators has failed.

The top UN official also called for fuel to be allowed into the Strip so that humanitarian convoys can operate.

“Our role and our pledge and our message is, we are right there sitting in front of those people on the borders of Gaza in Rafah, ready to go at the right scale if we get the means to do so,” he said.

ends

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.

In addition to disputes brought before the “world court”, intergovernmental bodies can also submit petitions seeking advice on key issues.

That’s according to Philippe Gautier, ICJ Registrar, who highlights that these “advisory opinions” do not deal with a judgement to settle a dispute between nations, but to help bodies such as the General Assembly make important decisions.

Mr. Gautier spoke with UN News’ Jerome Bernard, and started by explaining one of the 18 cases currently on its docket, brought by Ukraine against Russia. 

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Jerome Bernard.

The post Alarm over Kim Jong Un’s Russia Trip appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

The assembly is meeting for general debate from this Tuesday to next, and opened with a fiery speech from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who pledged to use next year’s G-20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro to put the world’s inequitable development on the agenda.

“The 10 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity,” Lula said, noting the U.N.’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, a focus of this year’s assembly, were the world over far from being reached and could turn into the global body’s “biggest failure.”

“The destiny of every child born on this planet seems to be decided while they're still in their mother's womb,” he said. “The part of the world where their parents live and the social class their family belongs to will determine whether or not that child will have opportunities.”

‘Lost ground’

Biden, speaking after Lula, also acknowledged the failure of the world to make enough progress on the SDGs, which are now halfway due.  

“These goals were adopted at the United Nations in 2015 as a roadmap for improving lives around the world,” Biden said. “The hard truth is, after decades of progress, the world has lost ground these past years, in the wake of COVID-19, conflict and other crises.”

He called for fundamental reforms to the United Nations, and said his administration “​​will support expanding the Security Council, increasing the number of permanent and non-permanent members.” But he said the body, despite its flaws, was still key to world security and peace.

“The institutions we built together at the end of the Second World War are an enduring bedrock of our progress,” Biden said. 

Speaking in opening remarks before debate opened, Guterres also raised the U.N. Security Council’s decades-old membership structure, which has resisted change even as it has been criticized by the Global South and emerging powers as antiquated.

The U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members have since 1945 been the victors of World War II: China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia, which took the Soviet Union’s seat in 1991. Each has the power to unilaterally veto the council’s binding resolutions.

Guterres told the assembly that the “world has changed” since then, “but our institutions have not,” deepening the United Nations' struggle to effectively deal with crises of poverty, climate change and conflict.

“A multipolar world needs strong and effective multilateral institutions. Yet global governance is stuck in time. Look no further than the United Nations Security Council and the Bretton Woods system,” he said. “They reflect the political and economic realities of 1945, when many countries in this assembly hall were still under colonial domination.” 

“If institutions do not reflect the world as it is, [then] instead of solving problems, they risk becoming a part of the problem,” he added.

Great fragmentation

Guterres also noted that the world was again dividing into multiple competing power blocs amid tensions between the United States, Russia and China, and was “inching ever closer to a great fracture in economic and financial systems and trade relations.” 

“When that threatens a single open Internet, with diverging strategies on technology and artificial intelligence, and potentially clashing security frameworks, it is high time to renew multilateral institutions based on 21st Century economic and political realities,” he said.

To that end, he proposed a new U.N. body on artificial intelligence to guide governance of the technology, to prevent countries like China and the United States from inadvertently developing technology dangerous for the whole world in a race to outdo each other. He said the body would be like the International Atomic Energy Agency, an intergovernmental agency that does not have binding powers.

During his speech, Biden referenced the growing great power rivalry, too, noting that U.S. policy was not “about containing any country” and that he wanted to “responsibly manage the competition” with China to avoid conflict, but that international law had to be defended. 

He also said the world “cannot turn away from abuses whether in Xinjiang, Tehran, Darfur, or anywhere else,” and argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was testing the waters of a new world order where “core tenets of the U.N. Charter” no longer have any relevance.

“Certain principles are an international system, are sacrosanct: sovereignty, territorial integrity, human rights,” Biden said. 

“If we abandon the core principles of the United Nations to appease an aggressor, can any member state in this body feel confident that they are protected?” he said. “If you allow Ukraine to be carved up, is the independence of any nation secure? I'd respectfully suggest the answer's no. We have to stand up to this naked aggression.”

The remarks spoke to the issues faced by the global body as the General Assembly sits for the 78th time since its creation in 1945, amid renewed war in Europe and the emergence of China as a power.

Guterres, during his speech, said he was under “no illusions” about the ease of reforming the United Nations when three of its most powerful members – Russia, China and the United States – were at odds.

“Reforms are a question of power,” he said. “I know there are many competing interests and agendas, but the alternative to reform is not the status quo. The alternative to reform is further fragmentation.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

A young Samoan climate activist says the UN’s new guidance on children’s rights to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is “the first step to global change”.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have affirmed for the first time that climate change is affecting children’s rights to life, survival and development.

“General Comment No. 26” specifies that countries are responsible not only for protecting children’s rights from immediate harm, but also for foreseeable violations of their rights in the future.

• READ MORE: New UN guidance affirms children’s right to a clean, healthy environment
• UN child climate rights

It found the climate emergency, collapse of biodiversity and pervasive pollution “is an urgent and systemic threat to children’s rights globally”.

Children have been at the forefront of the fight against climate change, urging governments and corporations to take action to safeguard their lives and the future, said committee member Philip Jaffé.

Samoan-born Aniva Clarke, 17, is an environmental activist based in New Zealand. She has been a climate advocate since 10 years old.

Amplifying Pacific youth voices
Growing up in Samoa, she helped to amplify Pacific youth voices about climate change.

“Children and young people have been calling on action for so long and I think this is one of the many things and sort of products of that action working.”

Clarke was one of 12 global youth advisors on the inaugural Children’s Advisory Team, established to facilitate youth consultations on children’s rights, the environment and climate change.

She said the comments “create a framework” that hold 196 UN countries to account.

“They have recognised that there is a call and need for action,” she said.

Countries that have ratified the UN Child Rights Convention are urged to take immediate action including towards phasing out fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy sources, improving air quality, ensuring access to clean water, and protecting biodiversity.

A lot to lose for Pacific nations
Clarke said Pacific Island nations had a lot to lose and larger nations responsible for emitting the most carbon emissions must take a stand to preserve the environment for future generations.

“The climate crisis is a child rights crisis,” said Paloma Escudero, UNICEF Special Adviser on Advocacy for Child Rights and Climate Action.

Clarke is worried that future generations are at risk of not only losing their land but their “culture”.

“We lose our ancient traditions … we live off the land but we live for the land,” she said.

For island groups like Tokelau and Tuvalu, which are low lying atolls, if climate change continues, then “those communities risk losing their islands completely”.

The committee received more than 16,000 contributions from children in 121 nations, who shared the effects of environmental degradation and climate change on their lives and communities.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The July 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin included portions of two archival interviews Janine Jackson conducted on resisting climate disrupters. This is a lightly edited transcript.

HuffPost (3/4/21)

Janine Jackson: We think of pipelines and coal mines as arenas of the fight over climate policy, but another battlefield, rarely in the spotlight, is buildings. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the US, and about the same proportion of greenhouse gasses produced.

There’s an obvious social gain in adapting buildings to climate realities, making them not just energy efficient, but future-proofed against predictable weather events.

Many cities were working on building codes to reflect that need, until industry groups said, “Not so fast.”

CounterSpin heard about this largely under-the-radar story in March 2021 from Alexander Kaufman, senior reporter at HuffPost and co-founder of the nonprofit environmental news collaborative Floodlight.

After explaining that the International Code Council, or ICC, is a not-especially international consortium of industry and government groups that sets baseline model codes for different buildings, Kaufman moved on to what was going on in cities like Minneapolis.

Alexander Kaufman: “Once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back.”

Alexander Kaufman: Every three years, there is a vote on what is known as a “model energy code,” the International Energy Conservation Code. And this is a broad set of requirements and mandates around how thick insulation needs to be in certain zones, and what kind of windows are best to preserve energy within the building. And every year, there was a relatively low turnout of government voters who would have the final say on what made it into that model code. It was a pretty wonky topic; few governments were fully aware of their ability to participate.

And what happened is that in 2018, two things converged: Both there was this growing frustration with the fact that the last two rounds of codes had made really meager improvements on energy efficiency overall, about 1% each time, and there was the UN’s IPCC report, which really laid bare just how little time was left to dramatically slash planet-heating emissions and keep climate change within a relatively safe range.

And, as a result, you had groups like the US Conference of Mayors, and other campaign organizations that try to push a lot of sustainability policies through cities, organize their members, which include virtually every city over 30,000 residents in the US, to get together and register eligible city officials to vote in the process that took place in late 2019, which would set the codes that are set to come into effect for 2021.

And it was a huge success; they had record voter turnout. They had hundreds of new government officials voting in the process, and overwhelmingly voting for more aggressive measures to increase energy efficiency. Some of the improvements, going up from that 1% improvement the last time around, went as high as 14% for some residential buildings.

Likewise, they approved new measures that would essentially bring this entire national building code in line with what many cities across the country are already doing to prepare for a low-carbon future: requiring the circuitry for electric appliances, or electric vehicle chargers, be included automatically in buildings, because it’s much more expensive to add those things after the fact.

What ended up happening, once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back. And those industry groups include the National Association of Home Builders, one of the largest trade groups in the country, representing developers and construction companies, and the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, which has a lot at stake in the potential transition away from gas heating and cooking.

They rallied, and first questioned the eligibility of the voters to cast ballots in this election at all. And when it became clear that the voters who did vote were totally eligible under the ICC’s rules, they decided instead that they wanted to stem this from ever happening again, and proposed that, instead, this code, the energy code, is put through a separate process, known as a “standards” process, whereby there is no government vote at the end. It’s done entirely through these bureaucratic channels, where there’s no risk that government voters are going to buck with what the industry is comfortable with. And this is ultimately what they succeeded in making happen.

JJ: That was reporter Alexander Kaufman recounting an at once inspiring and very frustrating story of how far fossil fuel companies will go to thwart the public will in the effort to harm public health.

***

Of course, at the root, fights over responding to the climate emergency are fights over power, and accountability, and power. Resistance includes new visions, new models of how we run energy systems.

In the fall of 2019, the word “unlivable” was being used to describe California in the midst of wildfires and power outages. Our guest, and others, saw, at the core, not just climate crisis, but a private utility system that’s not incentivized to address it.

Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate and Energy Program at the Democracy Collaborative, filled us in on some relevant history of Pacific Gas & Electric.

Johanna Bozuwa: “This is a huge opportunity…to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate.”

Johanna Bozuwa: There’s a lot of history that’s here, in terms of PG&E not investing in its grid for so many years, and really putting shareholder profits ahead of the infrastructure that we now have, which has created this concept of the “new normal.” But it also doesn’t have to be. I mean, having these power shutoffs come on again and again? Governor Newsom has even said, these are incredibly not surgical. They are doing blanket shut-offs, because they’re afraid of liability.

But they’re also not providing the infrastructure that communities need to actually make it through these. So their phone lines are off, you can’t get on to their website, and there’s only a generator station for every county. And so that’s just showing that this is not just them taking precautions, this is them severely mismanaging a situation in which people are losing their power, and losing access to maybe life-sustaining medical apparatuses as well.

JJ: And you point to history. They aren’t just any utility that is being forced to deal with climate disruption; there’s more that we should know about the role they’ve played vis-à-vis climate change, isn’t there?

JB: Oh, yes, definitely. And the Energy and Policy Institute had a really important exposé. We hear a lot about “Exxon knew” and “Shell knew” on the news. But utilities knew too; they were part and parcel to the climate disinformation campaigns that have happened in the past and have sowed disinformation. And PG&E was a part of that as well.

So PG&E is not a good actor in this situation; they are the ones that were able to make money off of fossil fuels for so many years, and stopping action on climate change for years as well. And now they are paying the price, with their own infrastructure that they failed to invest in, so that it was ready for the new climate that they had, in part, given us.

JJ: Alternatives are not just possible; they are, as you write, “waiting.” So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the idea of public utilities.

JB: Yeah, absolutely. So I advocate that PG&E should be transitioned into public ownership, because it can eliminate some of those warped incentives that are associated with monopoly, investor-owned utilities that operate our energy systems. And we can move towards a situation in which a public good is provided by a public service. So by moving to a public institution, we are going to have, hopefully, a more accountable utility, whose shareholders and stockholders are us. It is the people who are living in California, and not the shareholders who are hundreds of miles away.

You talk a lot about the media; it’s been really interesting for me to look at some of the coverage that’s been happening around the investors that are circling PG&E right now. They’re saying, “Oh, we’ll take it over,” these venture capitalists like Paul Singer, who has been in bed with the Koch brothers for years, investing in anti-climate sentiments. And we see the same thing with Berkshire Hathaway, which is another major utility company that has been trying to stop distributed solar across the United States, just the type of resiliency we need for California.

But there are other options that are on the table right now, and they’re in action. San Francisco just put in a bid to municipalize their area, so that they could take back the grid, so that they could be in charge of their own destiny.

And similarly, San Jose, one of the biggest cities that PG&E provides service to, is saying, actually, you know what we should do? We should create a cooperative utility so that it is beholden to the people of California, and we’re taking over PG&E at the statewide level.

CounterSpin (10/18/19)

JJ: As we discussed when we talked about public banks on this show with Trinity Tran a few weeks ago, the word “public” isn’t like pixie dust; it doesn’t automatically make things work in a better way. But public utilities would have certain criteria about being democratized, about being decentralized, about being equitable. It’s not just a goal, in other words, but a way to get there, and who is involved in the process.

JB: Absolutely. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does provide us this opportunity to have more recourse. There is a history of public ownership in the energy sector. But we have the ability to design into that institution things like decentralization, things like equity, things like a democratized system, and build upon what we’ve seen work in the past, and also where we’ve seen public utilities historically fail.

This is a huge opportunity for California to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate, and how they’re going to ensure that they actually are creating a resilient California.

JJ: That was Johanna Bozuwa. We’ll end with that idea, of not only fighting climate disrupters, but visioning past them as well. We can call on news media to support that effort, but we can’t wait for them.

The post ‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Another image from the recently published photo book, “The People Sing of Mt. Paektu,” shows Kim Jong Un and his wife Ri Sol Ju warming their hands by a fire next to smiling soldiers in winter gear. 

The 100-page propaganda book – being used in educational sessions across the country – venerates the so-called “Paektu bloodline” going back to national founder Kim Il Sung, but in a more personable, family-friendly way than the more bombastic personality cult that Kim Jong Il, the current leader’s father, built around himself.

But what many North Koreans find jarring about the book is its attempt to burnish Ri’s image, “praising her as a noble figure of the Paektu line and a protector of socialism,” a source in South Pyongan province told Radio Free Asia on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Most citizens know Ri’s relatively humble origins as a singer for the Milky Way Orchestra, once one of North Korea’s most prominent musical acts.

A video of the orchestra performing the song Soldier’s Footsteps in 2011 shows Ri in traditional clothing, belting out militaristic lyrics such as “I lived my life in military uniform as time flowed by. Life has many paths, but I walked the path of revolution.” 

Because she is a well known singer though, people who have seen the photobook wonder why authorities are now trying to connect her to the Paektu line’s revolutionary past. 

“They scoff, asking how the authorities can propagate that she is of the Paektu bloodline, when most people know she was a singer in a performance group,” said the source, who said the book has been used during morning educational sessions for workers at several companies that have offices at the Unsan Pharmaceutical Plant where he works.

Pumping up her image

Though Ri Sol Ju married Kim Jong Un in 2009, she was only introduced to the public as his wife three years later, shortly after her husband became the country’s ruler. 

It is believed that Kim and Ri are parents of three children, including a girl named Ju Ae, who recently made several appearances with her father.

North Korea has been pumping up Ri’s status in recent years. In 2018, state media began calling her “Respected First Lady,” a title that hadn’t been used for 40 years. She has also made several public appearances with her husband over the past few years, including state visits abroad, something previous leader’s wives and consorts never did.

Being a former singer detracts from the idealized image of a first lady and could tarnish Kim Jong Un’s image, Ken Gause, director of Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs Division Special Projects at the Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses, told RFA.

“Especially in a culture like North Korea, where there's a certain harshness and certain purity, where they try to portray the leader as being above the kind of, normal sort of careers that some people would have, especially, dancers and things like that,” said Gause.

No images of revolutionary heroine

Curiously, the book favors Ri over Kim Il Sung’s first wife, Kim Jong Suk, who is treated as a national heroine for fighting alongside her husband against Japanese colonizers, a source in the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely. 

“There are no photos of Kim Jong Suk,” the second source said, “and she participated in the anti-Japanese revolution.”

So revered is Kim Jong Suk that authorities renamed a county, a naval academy, and several other places after her.

When people compare Ri to Kim Jong Suk they cannot help but see her as unworthy, the sources say.

Gause said that it is a mistake to expect Kim Jong Un to create a similar cult in the same vein as his father.

“I have a problem with people talking about Kim Jong Un's personality cult … It's nowhere near what his father's personality cult was,” Gause said.

Some Kim Jong Il myths include the story of his birth on Mt. Paektu, which includes talking animals, multiple rainbows and a new star appearing in the sky. Or his purported score of 18 in his first golf outing. 

“The personality cult has never been along [the same] lines [as his father’s], which are God-like.  He’s more human,” said Gause.

And part of projecting the more human like image is Ri accompanying her husband to public events, something that previous leaders’ wives or mistresses rarely did.

Ri joined Kim on 36 diplomatic events in 2018, according to the North Korean affairs website NK Pro, including a visit to China and three inter-Korean Summits that year.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung with additional reporting by Eugene Whong. Edited by Eugene Whong, Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

Instead, it focuses on strengthening the military and the country’s missile and nuclear capabilities, and authorities are forcing citizens to study the highly-touted proposal in educational sessions this month.

“This year’s party policy … is a repeat of the same old themes that have been repeatedly emphasized for decades,” an official from the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

Authorities published the booklet as a nojak, meaning it is among the county’s masterpieces of published materials, and therefore an “immortal classic work.” The only other authors of nojak are Kim Jong Un’s father and predecessor Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, national founder Kim Il Sung.

The master plan did in fact discuss some current concerns, according to the source, but none dealt directly with providing a steady food supply for the impoverished country that has been isolated by sanctions over its nuclear program.

“They covered forestry projects, developments in science and technology, and projects to eradicate non-socialist behavior,” he said. “But unless we change our current policy of emphasizing national defense and increasing the military’s capabilities, how will we ever come up with a policy that addresses the problems directly related to how the people are struggling to live?”

Part of the educational materials discussion of Kim Jong Un’s “heroic accomplishments,” but the people scoff at these, a source in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“The general secretary boasts about the nuclear force policy as a great achievement completed under extremely adverse conditions,” the second source said. “But this policy has been a fatal blow to the lives of the residents.”

“They say, ‘Why do we need to do these kinds of ideological studies when nothing has changed after decades of studying?’” he said. “This is presented as a 100-year plan to create a rich and strong country, but nobody actually believes that.” 

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jieun Kim for RFA Korean.

Pictures of the child – identified by South Korean intelligence as 9-year-old Kim Ju Ae, his second child – piqued far more public interest than any news about the successful launch of the Hwasong-17 missile, sources told Radio Free Asia’s Korean service.

Reactions varied widely, the sources said, amid speculation over Kim’s motives for revealing the daughter at this particular time.

Some saw a positive break with the secrecy surrounding the Kim dynasty children that enhanced their humanity, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons. Kim’s Jong Un was almost unknown to his people during the rule of his father, Kim Jong Il.

“Just as there are no parents who do not appreciate a daughter who looks just like them, the residents say that Kim Jong Un, like any normal parent, simply wants to show his cute daughter the launch of a new kind of missile,” the source said.

“Everyone is amazed that Kim Jong Un’s daughter resembles her father, just as Kim Jong Un resembles Kim Il Sung,” the source said, referring to his grandfather and the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948.

Others were critical of Kim, saying that showing his daughter the missile test exposed her to his violent, immoral side, the source said.

The state-run Korea Central News Agency had a different take. 

It declared that the father-daughter appearance at the missile launch epitomized Kim’s devotion to his country and family: Kim had come to personally guide a “historic major strategic weapon test-fire, a crucial milestone in bolstering up the nuclear forces of the DPRK, together with his beloved daughter and wife.”

Distraction?

Some speculated that the daughter’s emergence may have meant to distract the public and tamp down resentment over the missile tests, which are viewed widely – but secretly – as a waste of resources, the source said.

Feelings toward Kim have soured as he focuses on improving the country’s military capabilities while the people struggle to survive in an economy that has not yet recovered from harsh coronavirus restrictions and is still subject to international nuclear sanctions.

“This time, people only talked about his daughter, not the missile,” the source said. “It seems intended to divert residents’ anger and antipathy toward the missile launch.”

Women in the northwestern province of North Hamgyong were quite interested in Kim Ju Ae’s apparel, a resident there said on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal.

“Women who have children of the same age as Kim Jong Un's daughter were also interested in the white cotton clothes and the shoes she wore,” she said.

The second source said that people are now contrasting Kim Jong Un and his father, and curiosity is growing as they wonder how many more children he might have. 

“It is not easy to know the information about the great leader’s family,” she said. “Even if you know something, it is a secret that you should never tell others. In breaking this convention, there must have been a purpose to [Kim] revealing his daughter himself.”

The public appearance might have been to reveal Kim Ju Ae to the international community, and to normalize missile launches to the North Korean public to the point that they are events that can be attended by children, South Korea’s Unification Minister Kwon Young-sae told a Seoul-based media outlet.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn and Yongjae Mok for RFA Korean.

Pictures of the child – identified by South Korean intelligence as 9-year-old Kim Ju Ae, his second child – piqued far more public interest than any news about the successful launch of the Hwasong-17 missile, sources told Radio Free Asia’s Korean service.

Reactions varied widely, the sources said, amid speculation over Kim’s motives for revealing the daughter at this particular time.

Some saw a positive break with the secrecy surrounding the Kim dynasty children that enhanced their humanity, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons. Kim’s Jong Un was almost unknown to his people during the rule of his father, Kim Jong Il.

“Just as there are no parents who do not appreciate a daughter who looks just like them, the residents say that Kim Jong Un, like any normal parent, simply wants to show his cute daughter the launch of a new kind of missile,” the source said.

“Everyone is amazed that Kim Jong Un’s daughter resembles her father, just as Kim Jong Un resembles Kim Il Sung,” the source said, referring to his grandfather and the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948.

Others were critical of Kim, saying that showing his daughter the missile test exposed her to his violent, immoral side, the source said.

The state-run Korea Central News Agency had a different take. 

It declared that the father-daughter appearance at the missile launch epitomized Kim’s devotion to his country and family: Kim had come to personally guide a “historic major strategic weapon test-fire, a crucial milestone in bolstering up the nuclear forces of the DPRK, together with his beloved daughter and wife.”

Distraction?

Some speculated that the daughter’s emergence may have meant to distract the public and tamp down resentment over the missile tests, which are viewed widely – but secretly – as a waste of resources, the source said.

Feelings toward Kim have soured as he focuses on improving the country’s military capabilities while the people struggle to survive in an economy that has not yet recovered from harsh coronavirus restrictions and is still subject to international nuclear sanctions.

“This time, people only talked about his daughter, not the missile,” the source said. “It seems intended to divert residents’ anger and antipathy toward the missile launch.”

Women in the northwestern province of North Hamgyong were quite interested in Kim Ju Ae’s apparel, a resident there said on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal.

“Women who have children of the same age as Kim Jong Un's daughter were also interested in the white cotton clothes and the shoes she wore,” she said.

The second source said that people are now contrasting Kim Jong Un and his father, and curiosity is growing as they wonder how many more children he might have. 

“It is not easy to know the information about the great leader’s family,” she said. “Even if you know something, it is a secret that you should never tell others. In breaking this convention, there must have been a purpose to [Kim] revealing his daughter himself.”

The public appearance might have been to reveal Kim Ju Ae to the international community, and to normalize missile launches to the North Korean public to the point that they are events that can be attended by children, South Korea’s Unification Minister Kwon Young-sae told a Seoul-based media outlet.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn and Yongjae Mok for RFA Korean.

Pictures of the child – identified by South Korean intelligence as 9-year-old Kim Ju Ae, his second child – piqued far more public interest than any news about the successful launch of the Hwasong-17 missile, sources told Radio Free Asia’s Korean service.

Reactions varied widely, the sources said, amid speculation over Kim’s motives for revealing the daughter at this particular time.

Some saw a positive break with the secrecy surrounding the Kim dynasty children that enhanced their humanity, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons. Kim’s Jong Un was almost unknown to his people during the rule of his father, Kim Jong Il.

“Just as there are no parents who do not appreciate a daughter who looks just like them, the residents say that Kim Jong Un, like any normal parent, simply wants to show his cute daughter the launch of a new kind of missile,” the source said.

“Everyone is amazed that Kim Jong Un’s daughter resembles her father, just as Kim Jong Un resembles Kim Il Sung,” the source said, referring to his grandfather and the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948.

Others were critical of Kim, saying that showing his daughter the missile test exposed her to his violent, immoral side, the source said.

The state-run Korea Central News Agency had a different take. 

It declared that the father-daughter appearance at the missile launch epitomized Kim’s devotion to his country and family: Kim had come to personally guide a “historic major strategic weapon test-fire, a crucial milestone in bolstering up the nuclear forces of the DPRK, together with his beloved daughter and wife.”

Distraction?

Some speculated that the daughter’s emergence may have meant to distract the public and tamp down resentment over the missile tests, which are viewed widely – but secretly – as a waste of resources, the source said.

Feelings toward Kim have soured as he focuses on improving the country’s military capabilities while the people struggle to survive in an economy that has not yet recovered from harsh coronavirus restrictions and is still subject to international nuclear sanctions.

“This time, people only talked about his daughter, not the missile,” the source said. “It seems intended to divert residents’ anger and antipathy toward the missile launch.”

Women in the northwestern province of North Hamgyong were quite interested in Kim Ju Ae’s apparel, a resident there said on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal.

“Women who have children of the same age as Kim Jong Un's daughter were also interested in the white cotton clothes and the shoes she wore,” she said.

The second source said that people are now contrasting Kim Jong Un and his father, and curiosity is growing as they wonder how many more children he might have. 

“It is not easy to know the information about the great leader’s family,” she said. “Even if you know something, it is a secret that you should never tell others. In breaking this convention, there must have been a purpose to [Kim] revealing his daughter himself.”

The public appearance might have been to reveal Kim Ju Ae to the international community, and to normalize missile launches to the North Korean public to the point that they are events that can be attended by children, South Korea’s Unification Minister Kwon Young-sae told a Seoul-based media outlet.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn and Yongjae Mok for RFA Korean.

While speaking to the Supreme People’s Assembly on Sept. 8, Kim briefly mentioned that in preparation for winter, public health institutions would be “administering vaccination in a responsible way” but recommended that the public wear masks starting in November.

The speech made international headlines for Kim’s remarks on the nuclear issue — he refused to give up nuclear weapons and lauded a newly passed law that allows preemptive nuclear strikes — but North Koreans are more interested in the single reference to vaccines, hoping it means they can get their jab soon.

“When people gather around these days, they always talk about coronavirus vaccines,” a resident of Kyongwon county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“In areas close to the Chinese border, like here in Kyongwon county, things were more difficult during the COVID-19 quarantine period,” said the source.

Beijing and Pyongyang closed their 880-mile border and suspended all trade when COVID first emerged. 

Additionally North Korean authorities said anyone caught within a one kilometer “kill zone” at the border would be shot on sight. Authorities also held public executions of smugglers and locked down entire counties and cities when they detected “suspected cases.”

“Until the beginning of this year, border areas were much more brutally controlled by the authorities and the rules were enforced more closely than in other areas due to the fears of the malicious virus entering from China,” the source said.

The country maintained that it was completely “virus free” up until May this year when Pyongyang declared a national “maximum emergency” after tracing a major outbreak of the virus to a military parade the previous month. 

The emergency protocol included locking down cities, restricting movement between provinces, and isolating suspected infected persons in quarantine centers. Though only a handful of COVID-19 cases were officially confirmed, government figures identified 4.7 million suspected “fever” cases and 74 deaths over the course of the emergency.

The emergency posture ended Aug. 10, when North Korea claimed victory over the virus.

“I know it is the same throughout the country. But many people in Kyongwon county were ill with COVID-19 during the emergency quarantine period. They died without receiving any treatment because no medicine was available,” the source said. 

“There are 30 households in my neighborhood watch unit. Of those, five have lost members of their family to COVID-19. One household even lost three family members,” the source said. “Everyone is saying we would not have suffered so many deaths if the entire population had been vaccinated against the coronavirus like in other countries.

“I don’t know why the authorities are only now talking about vaccination, when China and other countries started on that so much earlier.” 

North Korea rejected 3 million doses of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine in September 2021, still claiming to be virus free. Pyongyang also twice rejected vaccine assistance from Russia, and did not respond to offers from the Biden administration during the maximum emergency.

“Whenever the neighborhood sees the leader of the neighborhood watch unit, they ask if there is an order to start the vaccination,” the source said.

“Although the authorities are currently promoting the main points addressed in Kim Jong Un’s administrative policy speech, the only thing we are interested in is vaccination.”

A resident of Hyesan, a city in Ryanggang province that borders China, said the biggest concern for locals is when a vaccine will become available. 

“Kim Jong Un mentioned COVID-19 vaccination in his administrative policy speech at the Supreme People's Assembly on Sept. 8th,” the second source told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely. “There should be specific instructions or actions related to vaccination by now. But it's frustrating because the authorities are still quiet.

“We know that vaccines produced in the United States or Europe, where science and technology are more advanced, have excellent safety and effectiveness. Some people are concerned about getting poorer quality Chinese or Russian vaccines,” the second source said.

The disease and government orders to contain it have taken their toll on the Hyesan resident.

“I hope that the nationwide vaccination campaign is completed quickly. I want to live comfortably without having to fear malignant infectious disease.”

RFA reported in late May that the government had begun vaccinating soldiers mobilized as labor for a high-profile construction project in the capital Pyongyang. The campaign was promoted in propaganda films, with soldiers appearing to be moved to tears as they received what the films referred to as the “Immortal Potion of Love” from their benevolent leader Kim Jong Un. 

A spokesperson for the Global Vaccine and Immunity Alliance, which operates the COVAX initiative, told RFA that enough doses could be made available to inoculate every North Korean should the government mount a vaccination drive.

“COVAX will be happy to share the vaccine if North Korea asks for it to be introduced,” the spokesperson said. 

A spokesperson for UNICEF told RFA that it has not received any information regarding a proposed COVID-19 vaccination effort in North Korea.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA Korean.

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