A coming of age

United Nations

IN September, the leaders of the world descend on New York for the General Assembly of the United Nations.

What happens in the General As sembly is much less important that what happens around it, where the deals are made. Indeed, many of the important issues have already been settled in committees and preparatory conferences, but they still need the Assembly’s 184 members to ratify them This session, like most, has a series of issues of vital importance to the Pacific which is why one of the items on the agenda is giving the South Pacific Forum observer status at the UN, along with groupings like the Commonwealth and the Organisation of African Unity. In fact, small though it is, the Forum group is more coherent on many issues than its larger rivals, with South Pacific ambassa dors meeting regularly to coordinate its work.

Acceptance of the Forum may lessen the incentives of the remaining non member states to seek membership.

Although Palau and Nauru could afford to, it is still an expensive step for others

considering joining, like Tonga, Tuvalu

and even Niue.

As Ambassador Yosiwo George of Micronesia said, this session will consider the report back from the Barbados Conference of Small Island States, and a crucial question will be whether the nebulous promises of finance made there will get any firmer. “I think development issues will be very important for the Pacific this session,” the Ambassador told

Pim.

At this session also the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali will present a report on the defence of small islands states, requested two years ago by the Maldives and strongly backed by the Pacific islands. It is the relative powerlessness of the small states, shown by what has happened to Bosnia, that makes the United Nations and the rule of International Law so important to the Pacific.

Indeed, in August, when the Security Council endorsed a United States in vasion of Haiti, New Zealand’s Ambassa

dor Colin Keating, archly hoped that

“similar alacrity” would be shown when other small countries, farther away, found their democracy threatened.

The rule of International Law did

score a major breakthrough this August

when after 12 years, the United States’ belated conversion paved the way for a

As the world prepares for the General Assembly of the United Nations, lan Williams examines the issues central to the Pacific and how they might be resolved.

general acceptance of the laboriously negotiated Law of the Sea. Welcoming it, Ambassador Keating told the General Assembly that after 12 years of waiting, it “was one of a small group of treaties which would be considered second in

importance only to the (UN) Charter

itself’. He said that for New Zealand and its close neighbours in the South Pacific, the Conference on the Law of the Sea, the process through which the Conven tion was developed, represented “a

coming of age”.

However, if the Convention was to continue to be important, it would be important to ensure that all of its

provisions were effectively implemented.

He stressed the issues of marine pollution, hazardous wastes and radioactive wastes and the need for more specific rules to enforce the sections on high seas fisheries.

Within weeks the UN Conference on

straddling fish and highly migratory fish

stocks finished its fourth session at the end of August. And it almost looked like his hopes might be carried out. Fijian Ambassador Satya Nandan, the Chair man of the Conference, told PIM, “There is a general acceptance that there should be a binding agreement. It was a

good meeting.”

The Pacific, he says, “has had a very strong voice in the conference it’s been probably the best coordinated group.”

Of course, few other regions have as much at stake; as Ambassador Nandan says, “They are sweeping the seas we have to regulate fishing across the world, since the fish don’t recognise man-made boundaries.”

While the Pacific nations knew how important it was, it has recently had a boost from other regions. As fish stocks are vacuumed out of one fishery, the vessels made redundant have moved on

to the remaining fishing grounds to

repeat the same process. In Europe, the

Royal Navy now escorts British fishing

vessels to protect them against Spanish fishing fleets which were chasing the same rapidly diminishing stocks of tuna.

In Canada, the famous cod fishery on the Grand Banks is 80 percent in territorial waters, and was so depleted that the government has imposed a complete ban on all fishing. But someone forgot to tell the remaining cod that they were Canadian fish.

In fact, they were a “straddling fish stock”, and other countries’ fishermen waited just off the 200-mile limit to net them in. The Canadians took the logical but technically illegal action and en forced the ban there as well. If the Conference is successful in producing a binding international agreement, then actions like Canada’s would have legal backing — and there would be some hope of preserving the world’s last

remaining major fishery, the Pacific

tuna, from the depredations of the driftnetters.

The breakthrough, helped along by

Nandan’s diplomatic skills, according to other participants, was to get the grudg ing assent of Japan, Korea and China and other distant water fishing nations like Spain and Portugal to agree to anything stronger than a vague declar ation which they could then go off and

ignore.

The current draft establishes mini mum international standards for conser vation and management which Nandan says “would err on the side of caution, not using resources without sufficient information. The unavailability would not be an excuse to go ahead.”

The most important part would be to provide an enforcement mechanism for any guidelines, which is of course very important for Pacific nations who scarcely have the resources to police their own territorial waters, let alone the high seas, and even more so against the regional superpowers who appear to be the worst perpetrators.

There will be one more session in March to be followed, it is hoped, by a binding agreement in August 1995.

Let us hope there are some fish left to conserve. □