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"Political declaration"
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The journey of the one and only Declaration of Independence
Presents the story of how the original document that changed the fate of the nation still exists proudly today, despite being rolled up, transported on horseback, tucked away, inproperly repaired, and kept under lock and key.
Book
Mind the Fog, Stand Clear of the Cliff! From the Political Declaration to the Post-Brexit EU-UK Legal Framework – Part I
The Brexit saga has reached a watershed moment. The United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union on 31 January 2020 and, following the expiry of the transitional period laid down in the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement (EU-UK WA), it ceased to be bound by EU law. By the same token, it entered unchartered waters as a former EU Member State trying to find its place in an economically integrated world. This Article takes stock of the legal affairs as they stood on 1 January 2021. Yet, at the same time, it puts the new EU-UK legal framework in a broader perspective. For this purpose, it treats as a point of reference the Political Declaration, which was signed alongside the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement. A good chunk of its potential has materialised in the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (EU-UK TCA), although in some respects the proposals laid down in the Political Declaration are yet to turn into reality. Thus, to confine it to history books would be rather premature. While it is impossible to predict the future, the time is right to put the EU-UK legal framework under the microscope and to analyse its main legal parameters. The present Article offers such an insight. In part I, the centre of gravity is on institutional matters.
Journal Article
The 2023 New York SDG Summit Outcome: Rescue Plan for 2030 Agenda as a Wake-up Call for the Decision-makers
As a plenary organ of the UN, the General Assembly has invoked its principal instrumentality of resolutions to address a variety of global problems. The mirage of being called “recommendations” (Article 11, the UN Charter) has never come in the way of finesse with which the Assembly has invoked its resolutions to zero in on contemporary common concerns. The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by resolution 70/1 (September 25, 2015) has been one such major global action plan that became a milestone in a long line of engagements that have also carried the normative halo. Now at the mid-way to the 15-year cycle (2015–2030), the performance assessment on 17 Goals shows that the promise of leaving “no one behind” is in peril. In view of the reality of the world we live in and multiple interconnected planetary scale crisis situations, the UN member states have floundered in giving effect to the promises laid down in the 17 Goals of the 2030 Agenda. The UN Secretary-General’s report (April 27, 2023) has called for a resolute rescue plan for people and planet. The progress came to be reviewed at the SDG Summit convened by the UNGA President during September 18-19, 2023. The available data (Revised Zero Draft of June 8, 2023), underscored the gravity of the peril faced by the humankind since, out of 140 targets, “only about 12 per cent are on track; more than half, although showing some progress, are moderately or severely off track; and some 30 per cent have either seen no movement or regressed below the 2015 baseline”. The Political Declaration adopted at the New York SDG Summit coinciding with the meeting of the High-Level Political Forum, sought to work out a rescue plan considering the UNSG’s stimulus plan and taken the “pledge to act now, for present and future generations”. This article examines the process, the promise, the pledge and the rescue plan for the SDGs in peril.
Journal Article
Global strategies for implementing health financing equity – a state-of-the-art review of political declarations
Background
Implementing health financing equity plays a determining role in achieving Universal Health Coverage. For this reason, the global health community stated multiple political declarations to guide health financing equity implementation in countries. The aim of this study was to investigate the global strategies for implementing health financing equity that emerged from political declarations made before 2024.
Methods
Using a state-of-the-art review design, we identified the political declarations from the search of United Nations databases and the snowball search. We used textual and theoretical thematic analysis methods to extract the global strategies of health financing equity implementation that emerged from the political declarations. We grounded the global strategies in the existing practical framework – the Health Financing Progress Matrix of the World Health Organization. We employed a time-based descriptive analysis method to document the results. Quantitative information was used to shape the analysis.
Results
In total, 40 political declarations were included in the review. From these declarations emerged the strategies of targeted, selective, contributive, universal, claims, proportionate, experimental, united, and aggregated financing to implement health financing equity in countries. Thirty nine of the 40 political declarations that labelled the global health community from 1944 until 2023 placed more efforts on duplicating the prevailing strategies. The declarations, categorised into nine groups (target, unity, universality, selectivity, contribution, aggregation, claims, experience, and proportionality-oriented political declarations), were insistent to press countries effectively implement the strategies.
Conclusion
The political declarations proved to be the essential markers of the global health community’s efforts to raise the profile of health financing equity in countries. Although some of the global strategies that emerged from the political declarations have been shown promise in different countries, any global strategy is neither effective nor optimal for providing efficient and sustainable UHC in all countries. This lays the groundwork for careful management and adaptation of the global strategies to the diverse needs of the diverse population.
Journal Article
Commercial Influence on Political Declarations: The Crucial Distinction Between Consultation and Negotiation and the Need for Transparency in Lobbying Comment on \Competing Frames in Global Health Governance: An Analysis of Stakeholder Influence on the Political Declaration on Non-Communicable Diseases\
Suzuki and colleagues’ rare and elaborate analysis of the political processes behind the 2018 United Nations (UN) non-communicable diseases (NCD) Declaration discloses various pathways towards influencing global public health policies. Their study should be a wake-up call for further scientific political scrutiny and analysis, including clearly distinguishing between consultations such as UN multi-stakeholder hearings preceding high-level meetings and the actual negotiating and decision making process. While stakeholder positions at interactive hearings are documented and published and thus made transparent, the negotiating process among member states is not publicly known. The extent to which intergovernmental negotiations are influenced at country or regional levels by commercial interests through direct and indirect lobbying outside of public consultations should be given more attention. Lobby registers should be implemented more stringently and legislative footprints required and applied not only to legally binding but also to internationally important documents such as political declarations.
Journal Article
The 2022 Political Declaration on the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas: A tool for protecting the environment in armed conflict?
In November 2022, eighty-three States endorsed the Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas (Political Declaration). The Political Declaration is a new and significant development in the long-standing and ongoing efforts to protect civilians from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas – an issue which has been of growing concern for a number of states, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and civil society for more than a decade. The use of explosive weapons in populated areas has been documented to result in widespread civilian deaths and injuries as well as longer-term harm to civilians resulting from damage to or the destruction of hospitals, water and sanitation systems and electrical power grids. Although less researched, the use of explosive weapons in populated areas also plays a prominent role in damaging and destroying the environment in situations of armed conflict. This article examines the potential of the new Political Declaration for strengthening the protection of the environment. An express reference to the environment, and the impact of explosive weapons thereon, exists only in the Declaration's preamble, but the lack of express references to the environment in the Declaration's operative commitments does not mean it lacks potential as a tool for strengthening the protection of the environment. On the contrary, the preambular reference provides an important basis on which to argue that the armed forces of endorsing States must consider the protection of the environment in their efforts to implement a number of the Declaration's key operational commitments.
Journal Article
Interview with Eirini Giorgou
Dr Eirini Giorgou is a Legal Adviser in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Arms and Conduct of Hostilities Unit, where she works, among other issues, on explosive weapons in populated areas and on nuclear weapons. She has several years’ experience in multilateral disarmament and arms control diplomacy and negotiations outside the ICRC. She is a licensed lawyer and holds a PhD in international law from the University of Geneva.
Journal Article
The Future EU-UK Relationship: The EU Ambitions for a Comprehensive Partnership
The purpose of this article is to examine the objectives pursued by the European Union (EU) in crafting its future relationship with the United Kingdom (UK) after Brexit. As the article argues, the withdrawal of the UK from the EU created an unprecedented situation – namely that of a former Member State. In response to this unique state of affairs, the EU has deliberately and consistently endeavoured to develop with the UK as a new third country an ambitious partnership, going beyond trade to encompass many other areas of cooperation, spanning from internal and external security to sectoral themes such as the fight against climate change and health. As the article suggests, the EU’s approach vis-à-vis the UK emerges already in the negotiating guidelines, adopted in the aftermath of the UK notification of its intention to leave the EU; is codified in the non-binding Political Declaration outlining the framework of future EU-UK relations, attached to the Withdrawal Agreement; and is ultimately reflected to some extent in the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement reached between the parties on Christmas Eve 2020. Although this thin deal does not fully achieve the objectives of the EU, as some areas are not covered by the new EU-UK treaty, its scope, which goes beyond trade, confirms the ambition of the EU to lock-in relationship with a close, special neighbour like the UK. Brexit, Future Partnership, EU, UK, Negotiation Guidelines, Political Declaration, Trade and Cooperation Agreement
Journal Article
NCDs and Civil Society: A History and a Roadmap
On May 26, 2012 Member States of the World Health Assembly approved a global target of 25 % reduction in premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) by 2025 (WHO 2012). That means 2 % per year reduction in under-70 mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease. This is excellent news for the NCD community and takes the Political Declaration of the UN High Level Meeting on Noncommunicable Diseases in September 2011 from rhetoric to action. While a series of additional and more specific targets will be approved by the end of the year, including proposed targets on reducing salt, physical inactivity, and daily tobacco smoking, the overall mortality target is a critical turning point and a testament to successful advocacy across many civil society organizations and evidence that was first promoted by WHO in 2005. Most important, the success of this target and the Summit itself are due in no small part to successful advocacy and collaboration by the NCD community, which itself has emerged as cohesive whole only in very recent years, when individual groups dedicated to risk factors and specific diseases including cancer and CVD started to join forces to address the emerging NCD pandemic in low and middle-income countries.
Book Chapter
The Divide Over Independence: Explaining Preferences for Secession in an Advanced Open Economy
Anticipated trade, insurance, and fiscal shocks from independence structure preferences for secession independently from nonmaterial considerations. To test this claim, we draw from an original survey conducted in Catalonia before the 2017 regional election, which followed a suspended declaration of independence. Trade shocks produce differential effects depending on market specialization: Respondents working in sectors and at firms specializing in the host state market disproportionately oppose secession, whereas those specializing in foreign markets show no aversion to independence. Exclusion from public insurance strengthens preference for secession among the long-term unemployed. Support for secession also increases with skill levels but not because of expected postindependence factor returns. The skilled population shows a better understanding of the institutional design of interterritorial redistribution. In a context of autonomy retraction, this group is more skeptical of the accommodation of regional demands within the union. Overall, we advance an individual-level materialistic approach to the study of secession.
Journal Article