Britain recognizes Ouattara as Ivory Coast leader

CNN News, By the CNN Wire Staff, January 6, 2011

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Britain "does not accept the validity of statements made by others," the foreign office says
• The announcement came after British and Canadian envoys were expelled
• There is no immediate reaction from Canada

London, England (CNN) -- The British government announced Thursday that it has recognized Alassane Ouattara as the democratically elected president of Ivory Coast, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said.

Laurent Gbagbo pressured to step down

"It recognizes the legitimacy of statements made by or on behalf of his government," the statement said. "The British government does not accept the validity of statements made by others."

The announcement was made shortly after representatives of self-proclaimed President Laurent Gbagbo said he had expelled the envoys of Britain and Canada.

"It's in response to reports in the press that our high commissioner has been de-recognized," said Nicole Davidson of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Britain's representative to Ivory Coast, Nick Westcott, lives in Ghana, she said.

Canada's foreign office did not immediately return a call.

Independent election observers and the international community have recognized Ouattara as the winner of last November's runoff election. But Gbagbo, who has called for a recount, refuses to step down.

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Israel razes West Bank 'mosque'

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The Israeli army has demolished a number of buildings in West Bank, including one that Palestinians said was a long-established mosque.

The residents of Khirbet Yarza say the mosque was
built before the Israeli occupation of 1967

Israeli officials said the structures were temporary and built without permits in a military fire zone.

Palestinian villagers said the mosque was built before 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank.

The UN has criticised Israel for demolishing Palestinian property and prohibiting construction in the zone.

"This morning, The Civil Administration demolished eight temporary structures and a building construction that were built without the required permits a in a fire area, risking the lives of the population," said a statement from the Israeli ministry of defence.

An Israeli spokesman said none of the buildings was a mosque.

Construction and planning issues come under the jurisdiction of the Civil Administration in Area C, the part of the West Bank designated a military fire zone by Israel.

The statement said the Palestinians had been notified of the demolition order and been given a chance to appeal against it.

A spokesman for the residents of the village, Khirbet Yarza, said the villagers had papers proving the mosque was legal and built before 1967, reported the West Bank-based Ma'an news agency.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, settling close to 500,000 Jews in more than 100 settlements. There are about 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank..

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Amnesty Backs World Court, Slams Global Injustice

Jakarta Globe, Guy Jackson, May 27, 2010

London. Amnesty on Thursday called for the US, China and Russia to sign up to the International Criminal Court, in a hard-hitting report alleging powerful governments have blocked advances in global justice.

The trio and four of their fellow G20 nations — India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — must drop their opposition to the ICC, Amnesty said, as it unveiled its annual snapshot of global human rights.

The head of the London-based organization also called on Thailand to allow international investigators to help probe the army’s crackdown on protesters this month.

Amnesty International’s interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone said the group wanted “to ensure that no one is above the law”.

“Our report shows that powerful states hold themselves above the law and protect their allies so justice is only served when expedient,” he said at the report’s launch.

The group said no country could justify its refusal to fully sign up to the ICC — the only independent, permanent court with authority to try genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

However, Cordone said he was confident that the initially fierce US opposition to the court was lessening under President Barack Obama. “We feel that such opposition may be softening,” he said in an interview.

“If governments are serious about justice then they realize that this court is operating to proper human rights standards, and there should be no reason why it shouldn’t be supported. “So in the end I am optimistic that the United States will join the court.”

While hailing the ICC’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir over alleged war crimes in Darfur last year as a “landmark”, Amnesty condemned the African Union for refusing to act on it.

Cordone said he hoped that, now South Africa had broken ranks and vowed to arrest Beshir if he steps on its soil, the rest of the African continent would follow suit.

Amnesty is deeply concerned about this month’s riots on the streets of Bangkok, said Cordone.

He conceded that Thai security forces had been confronted by opposition demonstrators using firearms. “But in their response we saw the army shooting indiscriminately among demonstrators and sometimes apparently they were targeting unarmed people.”

The riots had been quashed, but an unknown number of demonstrators remained in unofficial detention centres in which there was a risk that rights abuses could go unpunished, he said. “The first step for the government is to disclose how many people they are holding so that proper access can be granted.

“At the same time, there is also a need for a proper investigation and the Thai government may want to ask for international assistance to make sure that this investigation is independent and credible,” Cordone said.

Agence France-Presse

Membership (as of October 2009), Orange denotes states where membership treaty is signed but not yet ratified

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Pope's immunity could be challenged in Britain

Yahoo News, by PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer

LONDON – Protests are growing against Pope Benedict XVI's planned trip to Britain, where some lawyers question whether the Vatican's implicit statehood status should shield the pope from prosecution over sex crimes by pedophile priests.

More than 10,000 people have signed a petition on Downing Street's web site against the pope's 4-day visit to England and Scotland in September, which will cost U.K. taxpayers an estimated 15 million pounds ($22.5 million). The campaign has gained momentum as more Catholic sex abuse scandals have swept across Europe.

Although Benedict has not been accused of any crime, senior British lawyers are now examining whether the pope should have immunity as a head of state and whether he could be prosecuted under the principle of universal jurisdiction for an alleged systematic cover-up of sexual abuses by priests.

Universal jurisdiction — a concept in international law — allows judges to issue warrants for nearly any visitor accused of grievous crimes, no matter where they live. British judges have been more open to the concept than those in other countries.

Lawyers are divided over the immunity issue. Some argue that the Vatican isn't a true state, while others note the Vatican has national relations with about 170 countries, including Britain. The Vatican is also the only non-member to have permanent observer status at the U.N.

Then again, no other top religious leaders enjoy the same U.N. privileges or immunity, so why should the pope?

David Crane, former chief prosecutor at the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal, said it would be difficult to implicate the pope in anything criminal.

"It's a fascinating kind of academic, theoretical discussion," said Crane, who prosecuted Sierra Leone's Charles Taylor when he was still a sitting head of state. "At this point, there's no liability at all."

But Geoffrey Robertson, who as a U.N. appeals judge delivered key decisions on the illegality of conscripting child soldiers and the invalidity of amnesties for war crimes, believes it could be time to challenge the immunity of the pope — and Britain could be the place. He wrote a legal opinion on the topic that was published Friday in the U.S. news site The Daily Beast and Saturday in the British newspaper the Guardian.

"Unlike in the United States, where the judges commonly uphold what the executive says, the British courts don't accept these things at face value," Robertson told The Associated Press on Saturday. "The Vatican is not a state — it was a construct of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini."

But Jeffrey Lena, the California attorney who argued — and won — head of state immunity for Benedict in U.S. sex abuse cases, said the pope could not successfully be prosecuted for crimes under international law.

"Those who would claim that 'universal jurisdiction' could be asserted over the pope appear to completely misunderstand the sorts of violations, such as genocide, which are required to assert such jurisdiction," he said in a statement to the AP.

Still, Israeli officials, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, have recently been targeted by groups in Britain under universal jurisdiction. The law principle is rooted in the belief that certain crimes — such as genocide, war crimes, torture and crimes against humanity — are so serious that they are an offense against humanity and must be addressed.

It's a tactic that the British government would likely abhor, but British judges have often gone against government wishes in lawsuits.

Recent examples include British judges who issued an arrest warrant against Israel's former foreign minister for alleged war crimes, and a British court ruling this year that forced the government to release its intelligence exchanges with U.S. officials about the torture claims of a former Guantanamo detainee.

Prosecution in the deepening cleric sex abuse scandal, however, ultimately rests on the question of immunity. If British judges do challenge the pope's immunity, there are a handful of possible legal scenarios — all of them speculative.

The pope could be served for a writ for civil damages, a complaint could be lodged with the International Criminal Court, or abuse victims could try to have Benedict arrested for crimes against humanity — perhaps the least likely scenario.

Lawyers question whether an alleged systematic cover-up could be considered a crime against humanity — a charge usually reserved for the International Criminal Court — and whether it could be pursued under universal jurisdiction.

Attorney Jennifer Robinson in London, who has been researching the possibilities, says rape and sexual slavery can be considered crimes against humanity.

Others, like Hurst Hannum with the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University near Boston, are skeptical.

"No one would question that the Church's response to widespread abuses has been atrocious, but it's very difficult for me to see how that would fit 'crimes against humanity,'" said Hannum.

Robertson is more in favor of challenging the immunity question.

"Head of state immunity provides no protection in the International Criminal Court," said Robertson, who represented The Associated Press and other media organizations who sought to make U.S.-U.K. intelligence exchanges public in the case of former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.

"If acts of sexual abuse by priests are not isolated or sporadic events but part of a wide practice both known to and unpunished by their de facto-authority — i.e. the Catholic Church ... then the commander can be held criminally liable," Robertson said.

Even though the Vatican — like the United States — did not sign the accord that established the international court, a crime would only have to occur in a country which did sign, like Britain. Still, lawyers would have to prove that the crimes or an alleged cover-up occurred or continued after the court was set up in July 2002.

In a 2005 test case in Texas that involved alleged victims of sex abuse by priests, the Vatican obtained the intervention of President George W. Bush, who agreed the pope should have immunity against such prosecutions because he was an acting head of a foreign state.

It was around 1929 when Mussolini decided that the Vatican — a tiny enclave about 0.17 of a square mile with some 900 people — was a sovereign state.

"The notion that statehood can be created by another country's unilateral declaration is risible," Robertson said.

Others say the last 80 years of history have turned the Vatican into a state, and it would be almost impossible to strip the pope of his immunity now.

"My guess is the weight of opinion would allow the pope to enjoy immunity," said Hannum. "It's not automatically clear that the Holy See is a state, although it's treated as one for almost every purpose."

Last year, a Palestinian bid to have Barak — the Israeli defense chief who also served as prime minister until 2001 — arrested for alleged war crimes during a visit to Britain failed when the courts determined that he should be given immunity from arrest.

But months later, pro-Palestinian activists persuaded a London judge to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli politician Tzipi Livni, who was foreign minister during the 2008-2009 war in Gaza. The warrant was eventually withdrawn after Livni canceled her trip.

Spain and Britain jointly pioneered the universal jurisdiction concept when, in 1998, Britain executed a Spanish arrest warrant for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on torture claims. Pinochet was kept under house arrest in London until he was ruled physically and mentally unfit to stand trial and released in 2000.

When he was arrested, however, Pinochet was no longer head of state.

In 2001, activists brought Israel's then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to trial in Belgium in connection with a 1982 massacre at a Beirut refugee camp. Sharon canceled a planned trip to Belgium and was tried in absentia in a Belgian court. He was not convicted but the case provoked diplomatic protests and prompted Belgium in 2003 to tighten the law that had permitted the trial.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has vowed to block private groups from taking legal action against visiting foreign dignitaries but any new law is unlikely before Britain's expected May 6 election.

The pope plans to visit Malta, Portugal and Cyprus before traveling to Britain on Sept. 16. A trip to Spain is planned for later in the fall.

Associated Press Writers Gregory Katz and Raphael Satter in London, Nicole Winfield in Rome and Daniel Woolls from Madrid contributed to this report.

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Asia-Pacific MDG progress under threat from global economic crisis

Asian Development Bank

ESCAP, ADB and UNDP joint Report calls for strengthening social protection

MANILA (UN ESCAP Information Services) – A joint report by the United Nations and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) warns that the global economic crisis could trap an additional 21 million people in the Asia-Pacific region in extreme poverty, living on less than $1.25 a day.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in an Era of Global Uncertainty: Asia-Pacific Regional Report 2009/10, launched today in Manila, examines the toll that the global economic crisis has taken on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Asia-Pacific region. Produced by United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), ADB and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the report identifies opportunities for action – showing how countries of Asia and the Pacific can better protect themselves from this and future crises.

“This report shows that, while we are at a moment of crisis for the MDGs we also have an opportunity,” says Noeleen Heyzer, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP at the report launch. “As this crisis has exposed many vulnerabilities in the region – we can now address them and direct this recovery towards a stronger sustainable development path for the Asia-Pacific region.”

"Most stimulus measures have focused on areas other than social expenditures," says Ursula Schaefer-Preuss, ADB Vice President. "If we are to address the human impacts of the economic slowdown and achieve the MDGs, then social spending needs to be stepped up substantially."

"Asia has much weaker social protection compared to other regions such as Latin America and Eastern Europe,” says Ajay Chhibber, UNDP Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific and UN Assistant Secretary-General. “Without better protection people fall back into poverty with economic crisis, health pandemics and natural disasters and cannot recover easily, making the achievement of MDGs more difficult."

The report notes that long-term social protection can actually strengthen Asia’s resilience against future shocks. Yet the report finds that across the region, only 20 per cent of the unemployed and underemployed have access to labour market programmes such as unemployment benefits, and only 30 per cent of older people receive pensions.

If fiscal stimulus packages have a strong component of social expenditures, notes the report, this is likely to produce a double dividend – not only boosting growth more rapidly but also accelerating progress towards the MDGs.

Prior to the economic crisis, the region as a whole had been making notable gains, including being on track to achieve three important targets: gender parity in secondary education, ensuring universal access of children to primary school, and halving the proportion of people living below the $1.25-a-day poverty line. However, the economic crisis undermined the momentum.

Asia and the Pacific is still the home to the largest number – more than 50 per cent – of people, both rural and urban, without basic sanitation, of under-5 children who are underweight, of people infected with TB, of people living on less than $1.25 a day, and of rural people without access to clean water, according to the report.

It notes that in 2009 the crisis trapped up to an additional 17 million people in extreme poverty, and in 2010, another 4 million, giving a total of 21 million or roughly the equivalent to the population of Australia.

The most adversely affected segment of the population is women, who constitute the majority of Asia’s low-skilled, low-salaried, and temporary workforce that can easily be laid off during economic downturns. Moreover the crisis has reduced the demand for migrant labour – and women form nearly two-thirds of the total Asian migrant population.

The report points to opportunities for the region to protect itself and the MDG progress from future crisis though regional cooperation. Regional cooperation would also be particularly valuable for the trade in food, and could include grain banks that are maintained in each country but readily accessible to others, notes the report.

Expanding Asian monetary and financial coordination would be particularly useful to reduce external shocks such as with the global financial crisis. While fiscal stimulus is the most practical way of filling the gap left by declining exports, in the medium and long term, countries will need to generate domestic demand in a more sustainable way.

Countries can consider diversifying their export markets to become less dependent on demand in the West, suggests the report. They can boost trade within the region by liberalizing trade regimes and improving transport links, simplifying customs and inspection procedures.

By lowering trade barriers and creating more opportunity for the Asia-Pacific region to invest within itself, there can be a greater insulation against such crisis in the future.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in an Era of Global Uncertainty: Asia-Pacific Regional Report 2009/10 is the fourth regional MDG report for Asia and the Pacific produced by the three agencies.

For more information please go to: http://www.mdgasiapacific.org/.

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UN chief "deeply saddened" to confirm death of top UN officials in Haiti

www.chinaview.cn 2010-01-17 06:39:52

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday that he is "deeply saddened to confirm the tragic death" of his special representative to Haiti, Hedi Annabi, and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa.

In a statement issued at the UN Headquarters in New York, Ban said, "In every sense of the word, they gave their lives for peace."

File photo taken on Jan. 21, 2008 shows Hedi Annabi attending a press conference in Brasilia, capital of Brazil. Hedi Annabi, chief of United Nations (UN) in Haiti was found dead among debris in the quake-destroyed UN headquarters in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Chinese rescuers announced on Jan. 16, 2010. (Xinhua/Brazil News Agency)

Photo Gallery>>>

Also confirmed dead were the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ban said.

Annabi, a Tunisian national who was head of the UN Stability Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), was found dead among debris in the quake-destroyed UN Headquarters in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Chinese rescuers announced in the capital on Saturday.

Xinhua reporters witnessed Annabi's body being recuperated by the Chinese rescue team on Saturday afternoon. He was believed to be in a meeting with a high-ranking delegation from China when the quake struck the small island country.

"Our hearts are with them, the families and friends of Hedi, Luiz, Doug and the many other UN heroes who gave their lives for Haiti and for the highest ideals of the United Nations," said the secretary-general. "Their dearest wish, I am sure, would be that we carry forward the noble work that they and their colleagues performed so well."

Annabi was born in 1944, he joined the United Nations in 1981 and served as deputy head of UN peacekeeping operations from 1997 to 2007. He assumed his Haiti post in September 2007.

Annabi "was a true citizen of the world. The United Nations was his life and he ranked amongst its most dedicated and committed sons," Ban said. "He was passionate about its mission and its people."

Chinese peacekeeping police wait for the return of their buried colleagues in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, Jan. 16, 2010. Six bodies of eight Chinese peacekeeping police buried in the debris of Haitian earthquake have been found by the press time. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

"He gave of himself fully -- with energy, discipline and great bravery," he said. "From his start as a desk officer for Cambodia to his involvement in literally every peacekeeping operation the UN launched for over a decade, he was the gold standard of service against which all who had the privilege to work with him were measured.

"An icon of UN peacekeeping, there was no better representative of the international civil service. A mild man with the heart of alion, he is remembered by those who knew him for his dry sense of humor, his integrity and his unparalleled work ethic -- he was thefirst in and the last out every day for his entire career.

"He was proud of the UN mission in Haiti -- proud of its accomplishments in bringing stability and hope to Haiti's people, proud of his UN staff," he said.

Liu Xiangyang (L), deputy chief of the National Earthquake Disaster Emergency Rescue Team, salutes to a Chinese victim in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, on Jan. 16, 2010. The bodies of all eight Chinese police officers who were buried during the Haiti quake had been found as of early Sunday morning Beijing time, the Ministry of Public Security said. (Xinhua/Yuan Man)

"Luiz Carlos da Costa, from Brazil, was for many, many years a legend of UN peacekeeping operations," the secretary-general said. "His extraordinary professionalism and dedication were matched only by his charisma and warmth, and his devotion to his many friends."

"Over decades, he brought many of the finest and most talented staff to the United Nations. He was a mentor to generations of UN staff," Ban said. "He knew them; he knew their families; and his heart was always open to hear their story and to help them."

"His legacy lives in the thousands that serve under the blue flag in every corner of the globe."

"Doug Coates was a long-serving member of the international law enforcement community," Ban said. "He was a true friend of Haiti and the United Nations. He was a great police officer who believed to his core in the importance of rule of law and justice."

Chinese peacekeeping police salute to the body of their buried colleague in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, Jan. 16, 2010. Six bodies of eight Chinese peacekeeping police buried in the debris of Haitian earthquake have been found by the press time. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

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Bob Dylan song adopted by Copenhagen climate summit

BBC News, By Barbara Plett, BBC UN correspondent, New York

Bob Dylan - now 68 - first performed the song in 1962

Bob Dylan has star billing at the climate change summit in Copenhagen… or at least, his music does.

The United Nations has adopted one of his songs, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall, as its unofficial anthem for the talks.

This is a song best known for channelling the fears of a generation living under the threat of nuclear war.

Dylan performed it for the first time in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, shortly before a plan by Moscow to station atomic missiles in Cuba set off a crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But Hard Rain has weathered well, and is now being invoked to highlight this generation's fear of environmental calamity.

That is testimony to the enduring and universal power of its lyrics, says David Fricke, a senior editor at the Rolling Stone music magazine in New York.

"Let me just quote some lines and see if any sound familiar," he says.

"'I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests; I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans; I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.'

"What about this don't we recognise? All of those images and the pictures those words conjure, they're as familiar as a cable news report four minutes ago!"

The song has inspired numerous covers by various musicians. It also inspired a UN environmental photographer, Mark Edwards.

His Hard Rain odyssey began in 1969, when he was rescued by Tuareg nomads after getting lost in the Sahara Desert.

"My rescuer rubbed two sticks together," recalls Mr Edwards.

"He made a fire and we had a nice cup of tea. Then he turned his battered old cassette player on, and Bob Dylan sang 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall.'

"I was fascinated by the lyrics, and I decided to illustrate each line of the song. In the years that followed I added pictures as I saw them."

Scepticism

The UN is exhibiting his work at the climate change conference, accompanied by the release of a rare live recording of Bob Dylan performing the song, which the UN is using as an unofficial soundtrack to the summit.

"What the exhibition does, and what Dylan's lyrics allow us to do, is to illustrate all of our global problems," explains Mr Edwards.

"Poverty, population expansion, conventional pollution. If we want to solve climate change, if we really want to deal with this huge issue, we've got to see the whole of it, we've got to respond to this problem in totality."

Others are less enthusiastic, including Max Schulz, an energy expert at the Manhattan Institute think tank.

He is sceptical about doomsday climate change predictions, and he is also a Bob Dylan fan who thinks the UN is exploiting a great song for its own narrow purposes.

"The idea that the UN is now taking a Bob Dylan tune and putting it up to be the anthem for Copenhagen seems to me kind of silly," he says.

"And trying to play on the environmental alarmism of the song seems doubly silly.

"It is not clear from anything that we know about the song that it has anything to do with environmental harm or destruction: it's a bizarre song, it's an inscrutable one."

But regardless of what Bob Dylan did or did not mean, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall clearly remains an indictment, says David Fricke, and a stark warning to today's leaders.

"It really shows that if we don't address things, the hard rain is not only 'gonna' fall," he says, "but it's been falling already, and we've haven't been paying attention."

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The 16 Ships Create As Much Pollution As All Cars in The World

Kompas, SUNDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2009 | 7:52 AM

Waiting game: Tankers moored off Devon waiting for oil prices to rise even further

KOMPAS.com - Last week it was revealed that 54 oil tankers are anchored off the coast of Britain, refusing to unload their fuel until prices have risen.

But that is not the only scandal in the shipping world. Today award-winning science writer Fred Pearce – environmental consultant to New Scientist and author of Confessions Of An Eco Sinner – reveals that the super-ships that keep the West in everything from Christmas gifts to computers pump out killer chemicals linked to thousands of deaths because of the filthy fuel they use.

We've all noticed it. The filthy black smoke kicked out by funnels on cross-Channel ferries, cruise liners, container ships, oil tankers and even tugboats. It looks foul, and leaves a brown haze across ports and shipping lanes. But what hasn’t been clear until now is that it is also a major killer, probably causing thousands of deaths in Britain alone.

As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars.

Because of their colossal engines, each as heavy as a small ship, these super-vessels use as much fuel as small power stations. But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use.

Thanks to decisions taken in London by the body that polices world shipping, this pollution could kill as many as a million more people in the coming decade – even though a simple change in the rules could stop it. There are now an estimated 100,000 ships on the seas, and the fleet is growing fast as goods are ferried in vast quantities from Asian industrial powerhouses to consumers in Europe and North America.

The recession has barely dented the trade. This Christmas, most of our presents will have come by super-ship from the Far East; ships such as the Emma Maersk and her seven sisters Evelyn, Eugen, Estelle, Ebba, Eleonora, Elly and Edith Maersk. Each is a quarter of a mile long and can carry up to 14,000 full-size containers on their regular routes from China to Europe.

Emma – dubbed SS Santa by the media – brought Christmas presents to Europe in October and is now en route from Algeciras in Spain to Yantian in southern China, carrying containers full of our waste paper, plastic and electronics for recycling.

But it burns marine heavy fuel, or ‘bunker fuel’, which leaves behind a trail of potentially lethal chemicals: sulphur and smoke that have been linked to breathing problems, inflammation, cancer and heart disease.

James Corbett, of the University of Delaware, is an authority on ship emissions. He calculates a worldwide death toll of about 64,000 a year, of which 27,000 are in Europe. Britain is one of the worst-hit countries, with about 2,000 deaths from funnel fumes. Corbett predicts the global figure will rise to 87,000 deaths a year by 2012.

Part of the blame for this international scandal lies close to home. In London, on the south bank of the Thames looking across at the Houses of Parliament, is the International Maritime Organisation, the UN body that polices the world’s shipping.

For decades, the IMO has rebuffed calls to clean up ship pollution. As a result, while it has long since been illegal to belch black, sulphur-laden smoke from power-station chimneys or lorry exhausts, shipping has kept its licence to pollute.

For 31 years, the IMO has operated a policy agreed by the 169 governments that make up the organisation which allows most ships to burn bunker fuel.

Christian Eyde Moller, boss of the DK shipping company in Rotterdam, recently described this as ‘just waste oil, basically what is left over after all the cleaner fuels have been extracted from crude oil. It’s tar, the same as asphalt. It’s the cheapest and dirtiest fuel in the world’.

Bunker fuel is also thick with sulphur. IMO rules allow ships to burn fuel containing up to 4.5 per cent sulphur. That is 4,500 times more than is allowed in car fuel in the European Union. The sulphur comes out of ship funnels as tiny particles, and it is these that get deep into lungs.

Thanks to the IMO’s rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulphur in a year – the same as 50million typical cars, each emitting an average of 100 grams of sulphur a year.

With an estimated 800million cars driving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sulphur as the world fleet of cars.

A year ago, the IMO belatedly decided to clean up its act. It said shipping fuel should not contain more than 3.5 per cent sulphur by 2012 and eventually must come down to 0.5 per cent. This lower figure could halve the deaths, says Corbett.

It should not be hard to do. There is no reason ship engines cannot run on clean fuel, like cars. But, away from a handful of low-sulphur zones, including the English Channel and North Sea, the IMO gave shipping lines a staggering 12 years to make the switch. And, even then, it will depend on a final ‘feasibility review’ in 2018.

In the meantime, according to Corbett’s figures, nearly one million more people will die.

Smoke and sulphur are not the only threats from ships’ funnels. Every year they are also belching out almost one billion tons of carbon dioxide. Ships are as big a contributor to global warming as aircraft – but have had much less attention from environmentalists.

Both international shipping and aviation are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol rules on cutting carbon emissions. But green pressure is having its effect on airlines. Ahead of next month’s Copenhagen climate talks, airlines have promised to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2050.

But shipping companies are keeping their heads down. A meeting of the IMO in July threw out proposals from the British Chamber of Shipping, among others, to set up a carbon-trading scheme to encourage emissions reductions.

Amazingly, they pleaded poverty. Two-thirds of the world’s ships are registered in developing countries such as Panama. These are just flags of convenience, to evade tougher rules on safety and pay for sailors.

But at the IMO, governments successfully argued that ships from developing countries should not have to cut carbon emissions. IMO secretary-general Efthimios Mitropoulos insisted: ‘We are heavily and consistently engaged in the fight to protect and preserve our environment.’ Yet without limits, carbon emissions from shipping could triple by 2050.

The failure brought calls for the IMO to be stripped of its powers to control the world’s ships. Colin Whybrow, of Greenwave, a British charity set up to campaign for cleaner shipping, says: ‘The IMO is drinking in the last-chance saloon.’

Burning low-sulphur fuel won’t cut carbon emissions from ships. But there are other ways. More efficient engines could reduce emissions by 30 per cent, according to British marine consultant Robin Meech.

Cutting speed could reduce emissions by as much again. And there are even wackier ways, such as putting up giant kites to harness the wind as in the days of sailing ships. However you look at it, the super-ships are rogues on the high seas, operating under pollution standards long since banished on land; warming the planet and killing its inhabitants. Santa’s sleigh, they are not.

Robert Pedersen, of Maersk, said: ‘The sulphur content varies according to where you get your fuel. Our average sulphur content is, I believe, 2.5 per cent. It’s rather rare you get anything close to 4.5 per cent.’ He added that ‘the sulphur issue is one for the whole industry’ and that there would be a ‘huge cost implication’ to switch to cleaner fuel.

Editor: jimbon

Source : The Daily Mail

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