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    Aarhus: State drags feet on legal costs in environmental cases.

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      By Kieran Fitzpatrick. The Aarhus Convention aims to protect the environment and proclaims the public to be the best guardian of the environment. There are three strands to the convention: 1) Access to information; 2)Public participation; and 3) Access to justice to review environment-related decisions or to enforce environmental law. Ireland was the last member of the EU to ratify Aarhus and became eligible for ‘Communications’ subsequent to October 2013. This delay comes from the apparent reluctance of the Irish government to deal with the issue of prohibitive legal costs. The EU Commission prosecuted Ireland in 2007 for failing to comply with an Aarhus-related EU directive. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in 2009 that Ireland had failed to ensure that legal costs (relating to environmental legal actions) were not prohibitively expensive. Special Costs Regime – Catch 22 Ireland responded by passing legislation in 2010, the effect of which was to alter the legal-costs rules from the prevailing English Rule (losing litigant pays winner’s costs) to the American Rule (each side pays their own costs) for legal actions that relate to an EU directive implementing certain Aarhus compliance measures. Ostensibly, the special costs regime (SCR) means that a party could at least represent herself, without being threatened with a huge adverse legal costs bill, if she failed in her legal action. However, there is a Catch 22 in the SCR. To determine that a civil action falls under the ambit of the SCR, the applicant must risk an adverse legal costs award in making the application for such a declaration. This trap became stark in one case – an application by Dymphna Maher to the High Court in 2012. Judge Hedigan in refusing the application effectively said that the Catch 22 arguably “acts in such a way as to nullify the State’s efforts to comply with its obligation to ensure that costs in certain planning matters are not prohibitive”. The SCR can be scuppered if (i) the claim is frivolous or vexatious, (ii) the applicant conducts her litigation in a manner disapproved of by the court, or (iii) the applicant acts in contempt of court. The second of these conditions introduces a huge level of fear due to the lack of clarity as to how this sanction might be implemented. The third item, “contempt of court”, also introduces uncertainty, as became evident in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) case of The Sunday Times v UK [1979] (the Thalidomide case). The UK introduced “contempt of court” legislation in 1981 giving clarity to the various offences encompassed, but Ireland did no such thing. So Ireland’s attempt to comply with the 2009 ECJ decision against it, was to introduce a SCR with a Catch 22, plus other unpredictable adverse outcomes, any of which could leave an applicant with a life-ruinous legal bill. This hardly meets the ECJ’s demand that litigants be assured that costs are not prohibitive “with all the requisite clarity and precision”. In any event, the American Rule should not be seen as a complete solution to the problem of prohibitive legal costs for the following reasons: 1.    An applicant may not always have the wherewithal to initiate legal proceedings as a lay litigant. 2.    Many environment-related legal actions inevitably fall under the ambit of EU law, which can result in a reference to the ECJ. The rules of procedure of the ECJ require that any applicant must be represented by a lawyer before the ECJ. In these circumstances, an applicant must give consideration to the employment of a lawyer. Own Lawyer’s fees A litigant who hires a lawyer to represent her can be in a tricky position when she comes to deal with the legal bill issued by her lawyer, at the end of proceedings. If she receives a surprisingly high legal bill, she is left with two choices: (a)    Complain to the Law Society. The outcome of this process is generally not published; so it fails to comply with the demands of Aarhus that “Each Party shall …. establish a clear, transparent and consistent framework to implement the provisions of this Convention.”   or (b)    Avail of the Taxation process (or legal costs adjudication) for solicitor/own-client costs. However, this also lacks transparency and operates rules that are unfair to complainants: (i)    Unless the complainant can show that she has been overcharged by at least one sixth, she must pay the ‘costs of the hearing’. (ii)    The complainant must pay an 8% stamp duty, if she fails to prove she has been overcharged by one sixth. (iii)    There is no published database of outcomes so that a complainant is blinded as to what is a fair fee of her lawyer, and is left more vulnerable to being ensnared by the one-sixth rule. These rules illustrate the failure of government to bring in “a transparent framework” to constrain legal costs; arguably the most important demand of Aarhus. These pro-lawyer rules also violate “equality before the law” requirements as well as other human rights. Equality under law is broken on two grounds: first, a client is treated differently to a solicitor in the matter of a contractual dispute. Second, solicitors are treated differently to other professionals, such as doctors or dentists in their contractual right to be paid professional fees. Dentists, for example, don’t enjoy the deterrent effect of a “one sixth rule” plus an 8% stamp duty on their fees. Dentists cannot overcharge with any degree of impunity. The US Supreme court ruled that imposing different legal rules on one party to litigation as opposed to another party, particularly on arbitrary grounds, violates the equal-protection clause of the US Constitution (GULF v ELLIS [1897]). The “one-sixth” rule allows solicitors to overcharge clients  by about 17% with impunity (as costs of a hearing will likely be about 9% of adjudicated costs, plus 8% stamp duty), without any effective remedy – violating Article 13 ECHR in addition to Protocol 1 of the ECHR (relating to property rights). The above

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    Stasis in the Southern heat

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      Ken Phelan On a typically fine July afternoon in California, three buses pull into the small, parched border town of Murrieta, but don’t outstay their welcome. Awaiting their arrival is a group of protesters, ventilating placards and pent-up vitriol in the heat. “USA, USA”, they chant,  “Go back home!”. Inside the buses, approximately 140 undocumented migrants – all women and children from Central America fleeing abject poverty and violence – have submitted their fates at the border patrol station in Murrieta. But it won’t be so easy: they are turned around to be driven to processing centres at least 80 miles away in San Diego and El Centro. An influx of illegal immigrants crossing the border from Texas into the US has led to widespread hysteria amongst protesters in border towns. One republican, Phil Gingrey, in a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, expressed his own concern at imminent danger by writing: “Reports of illegal immigrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning. I have serious concerns that the diseases carried by these children may begin to spread too rapidly to control”. In July, the Obama administration warned lawmakers that US border-control agencies would run out of resources and that migrant children would run out of beds if Congress did not approve $3.7bn in funds. More than 57,000 children have arrived at the southern US border since last October, trafficked into Texas from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala – that’s double the number from the same period a year earlier. Of the funds, as yet to be approved, some $1.8bn will be spent on providing care for unaccompanied children while they await detention. $116m of the $1.53bn allocated to the Department of Homeland Security will go towards paying the cost of transporting unaccompanied children back to their original countries, and a further $300m will be spent in Central America supporting border control. As Obama’s plans continue to hinge on a decision from Congress, some Republicans have stated that the funds should be drawn from existing foreign-aid programs that assist the immigrants’ home countries. Republicans blame Obama for previous legislation he enacted to defer deportation of some immigrants who had entered the US illegally as children, claiming this has sent the wrong message. On the other hand Obama is also running into trouble with some in his own party for his attempts to circumvent or reverse legislation brought into law in 2008 by George W  Bush; the ‘William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act’  guarantees extra legal protection to Central American  immigrants. Reversing it would allow, for example, such immigrants to be returned to their countries in as little as a week. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class action lawsuit against the Obama administration’s attempt to reverse the 2008 anti-trafficking act, claiming that the government is violating the fifth amendment due process clause, as well as the Immigration and Nationality Act’s requirement of a “full and fair hearing”. According to US Department of Justice figures, 44% of migrants appeared in court in 2012 without legal representation; few are entitled to court-appointed attorneys and most rely on pro bono lawyers or non-profit groups. However, with over 375,000 outstanding immigration cases currently waiting to be heard by just 243 specialist judges across the US, Obama is keen to be seen to be taking action, even if he was elected on an  Immigration liberalisation platform. The influx of migrants through Texas has less to do with just economics or simple opportunism than with myriad socio-economic problems throughout Central America. Honduras has the world’s highest murder rate, while both El Salvador and Guatemala are riven with both extreme poverty and crime. Central America itself functions as a stop-off point for drug smuggling between South America and the US – yielding a long history of gang violence. The problem has intensified in recent years due to turf wars fought by Mexican cartels. For many in Central America, who have witnessed friends, family or neighbours being killed on the streets, the perilous trip to the Mexican border is worth risking. Republicans castigate Obama for his inaction, while most Democrats oppose any change to the 2008 anti-trafficking act. The President attracted further criticism when he failed to visit the border on a recent visit to Texas. He has criticised Congress for its inaction and pointed out how a bill, passed by the senate last year, but rejected by the House, would have added an extra 20,000 border patrol agents. The solution seems to comprise four elements: a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, an easier legal immigration system, better enforcement and more border security. But as usual in the US, stasis is the fruit of partisanship as a visceral xenophobia substitutes for ideology or clarity of purpose. •

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    Isis crisis

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    Frank Armstrong Iraq came shuddering back into the news this summer after the spectacular conquest by ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, now preferring the term ‘The Islamic State’) of Mosul, the country’s second city. This was closely followed by the fall of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, and threats to a petrified Baghdad itself. As Village went to press it was being reported that 500 of the majority ethnic Kurds had been slaughtered in Sinjar with some buried alive and 300 women kidnapped as slaves. The region is bracing itself for further US and possibly British intervention in defence of displaced and murdered minorities, including many stranded on the slopes of Mount Sinjar. The scale of the carnage is untold. The New Yorker quotes an Iraqi named Karim: “In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza’. ISIS has laid claim to global leadership of the Muslim ‘Umma’, declaring its elusive leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi the new caliph, a position relinquished by the Ottoman Emperor in 1924. The organisation also sought to repudiate the nefarious 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty, long viewed by Arabs as the first, among many, betrayals by Western powers of the region’s right to self-determination. Sykes-Picot was a secret Anglo-French agreement signed during World War I which agreed to the dismemberment of the former Ottoman Empire and its apportionment between the British and French at the expense of their erstwhile Arab allies. The violent contagion of Syria’s internal conflict spread beyond its borders, reviving Iraq’s seemingly immutable sectarian division between Sunni and Shi’a. But simplistic Western analysis of these conflicts often serves to reinforce destructive sectarian identities. In Iraq as elsewhere, identity is plastic. 75% of Iraq’s population of over 31 million is Arabic-speaking with Kurds constituting the bulk of the other ethno-linguistic groups including, for example, 650,000 Yazidis. Muslim Arab Iraqis may in different circumstances define their identity as Arab in common with other Arab people. They could also assert an Islamic identity but this is complicated by the division between the Shi’a majority and Sunni minority. They could also claim to be simply Iraqi in common with those living within the borders of Iraq. To complicate matters further many Iraqis actually identify most clearly with their tribe. The artificiality of Iraq’s borders has made the task of maintaining the integrity of the Iraqi state a bloody business. ISIS seems to be skilfully forging an Arab-Islamic identity more focused than Al-Qaeda’s global pretensions. But ISIS is unlikely to advance much further in Iraq due to the presence in that country of a substantial Shi’a majority. In terms of the Sunni-Shi’i divide a survey of Iraqi history reveals shifting allegiances. The foremost historian of early twentieth century Iraq, Hanna Batatu records how “under the Ottomans Iraq consisted to no little extent of distinct, self-absorbed, feebly interconnected societies”. This social stratification was given legal recognition by the Millet system of communal representation, though unlike Jews and Christians the Shi’a, who were considered heretical Muslims, were not accorded this privilege, and were forced to operate under Sunni sharia law. Nonetheless, firm social boundaries divided the Sunni and Shi’a communities: “Socially they seldom mixed, and as a rule did not intermarry. In mixed cities they lived in separate quarters and led their own separate lives”. After the First World War, the British became rulers of the new state of Iraq whose borders were an artificial construct born of imperialist designs on the country’s oil reserves, and cloaked by a League of Nations Mandate. The first colonial administrators regarded the Sunni as a more rational branch of Islam and a Sunni King, Faysal, was installed as king after independence was finally granted in 1932. According to the historian David Pool it was believed that “the result of Shi’a involvement in political office could only be theocratic, fanatical, xenophobic rule”. The British thus carried over Ottoman social stratifications into the post-colonial era by keeping the Shi’a at a remove from the resources of an increasingly oil-rich state. As a result, despite amounting to 55 percent of the population, during the monarchy the Shi’a filled a mere 22 percent of government posts, while only four of 23 of Iraq’s prime ministers were Shi’a. Moreover, invisible obstacles were mounted to exclude Shi’a from membership of the Military Academy making it impossible for them to become officers. But despite the persistence of Sunni dominance Iraqi society was moving away from the legacy of empire and colonialism: by the 1940s Sunnis were giving their daughters in marriage to Shi‘a “when only a few decades before the impediment to such intermarriage seemed insurmountable”. In a bloody 1958 coup King Faisal II, along with other members of family, was executed. The resolution of Iraq’s internal contradictions seemed to express itself in the half-Arab-Sunni, half-Kurdish Shi‘i parentage of General Qasim, prime minister of Iraq from 1958-1963. This period, however, represented a false dawn as the genuine and widespread hopes for a radical break with the past and for the creation of a more open society that were awakened by the events of 1958 were gradually disappointed in the following decade. During the monarchy and beyond, many Shi’a had identified with the pan-Arab cause. Arab Nationalist parties contained Shi’a. So did the Ba‘th Party, which as late as 1963 had a majority of Shi’a in its top command and probably among its active membership. However, the prevalence of Shi’a membership of the Communist Party was taken by many Sunni propagandists as evidence of their opposition to the pan-Arab cause. The popularity of Marxism was connected to the decline in religious participation in the 1950s among the Shi’a. This decline can be discerned in both the ‘popular’ and the ‘juristic’ forms of the religion; with the decreased fervour of the ritual Muharram observances, and a drop in the numbers of religious scholars. Under Qasim there was evidence that the state was taking a ‘secularising’ path: family law

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    Getting married in China

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      Garreth Byrne Confucius (d. 479 BC) was an ethical teacher who laid down guiding principles for intending mandarin rulers in a feudal society. He stressed the importance of observing traditional rites to elicit harmonious responses from the Will of Heaven. A central part of his teaching was the duties of husbands towards wives and the correct responsibilities of wives towards their husbands, and the practice of filial piety. He never intended to found a religion and did not speculate about the nature of deities or the origins of the universe. Notwithstanding his attachment to the landowning, urban business and courtly ruling classes Confucius’s teachings have influenced the attitudes of all classes, including the landless peasantry, over the centuries. Confucianism as a body of philosophy is studied by scholars today, but is not officially taught to the masses. Communities have made up for themselves packages of beliefs blending elements of Buddhism, Taoism and animism with ethical pointers derived from Confucius. Sun Yat-sen became modern China’s first President briefly after the revolution of 1911 overthrew the Qing Dynasty. He and his western-educated Christian wife Soong Chingling abolished the feudalist practice of female foot binding and encouraged educational and health services for girls and women. After the communist victory in the civil war against Jiang Kai-shek’s Guomingtang in 1949, the communist government in 1950 moved to give “socialist protection and dignity” to married women. Mao Tse Tung’s Marriage Law blended socialist gender equality ideas with puritan Confucian ethical traditions. In 1950, the Chinese communist government enacted China’s first marriage law. It banned arranged marriages, concubine relationships and child betrothal. It allowed divorce but only after “mediation and counselling” had failed. The 1950s saw a surge of politically driven divorces as many Chinese women opted out of arranged marriages. In 1980 the Marriage Law superseded it, allowing divorce if one party was found guilty of extramarital affairs, domestic violence, or addiction to drugs or gambling. It also accepted “complete alienation of mutual affection” as grounds for divorce and allowed one party to ask get it, even if the other party opposed. A husband may not apply for divorce when his wife is pregnant or within one year after giving birth to a child or within six months after abortion. This restriction does not apply where the wife applies for the divorce. For many years, couples needed written permission from employers or neighborhood committees to end marriage. Many unhappy couples stayed together just to maintain privacy and standing. In 2003, however, a revised marriage law simplified procedures, enabling couples to get their divorce certificates more discreetly. In 2011, the ‘Third Interpretation of Several Issues concerning The Marriage Law’ was promulgated, addressing the question of property rights after divorce. One section caused anxiety, especially among married women. If a wife and her parents purchase a lot of furniture and fittings for the marital home these revert to the wife after divorce, but the home remains the property of the divorced husband. If parents buy a dwelling for a young man before he marries, and this is common among the urban middle classes, an intending wife’s name cannot be ‘inserted’ into the purchase or lease documents without the  likelihood of formidable objections from in-laws. The Marriage Law is intended to strengthen “the socialist marriage system”, maintain family harmony and promote social unity. Gratifyingly it is based on “freedom, monogamy and equality between man and woman. The lawful rights and interests of women, children and old people shall be protected. Birth control shall be practised”. Either party may become a member of the family of the other, if this is agreed. So a foreigner marrying a Chinese person may as a bonus get an extended family, with rights and duties. Marriage arranged by any third party, mercenary marriage (including via trafficking) and any interference in the freedom of marriage are prohibited. Familial violence and maltreatment or desertion of any family member are prohibited. Spouses shall be truthful to and respect each other. Family members shall respect the old, take good care of the underaged, and help each other so as to maintain an equal, harmonious and cultured matrimonial and familial relationship. The Confucian tradition and the Marriage Law insist that familial peace is the important foundation of social stability. It thus encourages love and mutual help, cultured matrimony and diligence and thrift in running the household, between family members. The wife has equal rights and obligations in every field, such as political, economic, cultural, social and familial relations. In the event of divorce, both husband and wife must agree upon the disposal of the jointly owned property; if they fail to reach agreement, the People’s Court shall decide the disposal thereof, following the principle of favouring the children and the wife. This has no equivalent in Western societies Although the socialist system offers women equality with men, due to ancient Chinese customs many people still treat women as inferior. Marriage Law offers special protections to the rights and interests of women. The Marriage Law stipulates that parents shall be obliged to raise and educate their children. The relationship between parents and children does not end when parents divorce. Both a Chinese father and a foreign mother shall, after divorce, have the right and the obligation to raise their children. Desertion is prohibited – of spouse, children or even of elderly relatives in need. Protection of old people is an important family obligation and it is a Chinese ‘traditional virtue’ in conformity with the teachings of Confucius. Filial piety is found in most world cultures and is the Fourth Commandment for Christians, for example. Marriage Law, and the Confucian traditions, declare that children shall look after their ageing parents. If a grown child fails in this matter, the dependent and infirm parents may seek a maintenance order in the courts. Foreigner spouses may find themselves surprised by this socio-legal obligation. Birth control is one of the major principles of the Marriage Law in China. It was included

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    If Ireland were Palestine

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      John Gibbons It’s almost 30 years since an IRA no-warning bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, killing five people. Its primary target, British PM, Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, escaped serious injury. Thatcher defiantly responded by saying that “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail”. Her composure in the immediate aftermath of the blast won admiration even from among her critics. Just over a year after the attack, Mrs Thatcher and Dr Garret FitzGerald met in Hillsborough Castle in November 1985 to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Imagine for a moment that the British government had instead chosen to respond to this brazen terrorist attack in the style of the Israeli cabinet under prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. First off, air raids batter Dublin city. Large areas are leafleted, telling terrified citizens to flee. As they abandon their homes, some are blown to pieces in the streets. Others, unable or unwilling to leave, die under the rubble of their houses. The brutality generates a reaction. More bombs explode across British cities, killing civilians. An army barracks is also targeted, while an effort to drive a lorry bomb to the House of Commons is foiled. This time, a massive wave of British armour sweeps over the border. Dundalk, then Drogheda, are pounded by 155mm mobile artillery pieces, while jets scream across the skies. Tens of thousands of refugees clog up the roads as they flee south. The RAF cripples Ireland’s airports while the Royal Navy imposes a blockade on our ports. Goods can only enter or leave the country with direct British oversight. Food piles up and rots at the ports while officials refuse to allow it to be shipped. Imports are reduced to a trickle. A police station in Manchester is blown up. The British retaliate to this ‘vicious act of terror’ by bombing Dublin’s main water treatment facilities. Next, they target power stations, permanently disabling Moneypoint in one air raid; the Aghada and Tarbert stations are next to be destroyed. The Whitegate oil refinery in East Cork is also bombed. Most of Ireland is in darkness, with no clean running water and a growing health crisis as a result of untreated sewage. International observers are shocked when British ground forces begin shelling UN-run schools and hospitals, where thousands had crowded for shelter as the attacks intensified. A British army spokesman explained how their military were the most moral in the world, and went to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Who knows, the attacks on hospitals and schools may have been IRA mortars that mis-fired, he explains. British army howitzers pound Dublin’s Beaumont hospital, killing 18 and wounding 60, mostly patients and medical staff. “The civilian deaths, if they were as a result of our measured response, are regrettable, but the IRA terrorists bear the full responsibility for operating near a hospital”, the British army spokesman adds. The above vignette may seem fanciful, but it’s one way to try to bring home the savagery of the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign waged by the world’s fifth most powerful army against a defenceless enclave. Rather than cowering in shame for his army’s criminal rampage into Gaza, Israel’s prime minister instead took the time to ridicule the “telegenically dead” Palestinian babies and children being piled up just to try to make his army look bad. And it certainly does look bad, and not just for the Israeli army. Former US president Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson jointly penned a devastating critique of the latest Israeli incursion in early August. What is not widely reported is that Israel’s brutal assault was both tactical and entirely premeditated. “This tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move towards peace, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April”, wrote Carter and Robinson. Hamas had in fact made a huge concession, agreeing to open Gaza to joint control under a consensus government with no Hamas involvement. The likelihood of reconciliation among the Palestinian factions leading to a peaceful framework for resolving conflict in the region with international approval and oversight was clearly a step too far for Israel, which prefers its own ‘open prison’ policy, where it keeps a semi-starved, humiliated and terrorised population on the edge of despair, presumably in the hope that they will eventually just beg to be deported from their own homeland. “The new (Palestinian) government also pledged to adopt the three basic principles demanded by members of the International Quartet (UN, US, Europe, Russia): non-violence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements. Tragically, Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has until now succeeded in preventing the new government’s deployment in Gaza”, they wrote. While Israel’s latest attack on Gaza is entirely illegal under international law, its conduct went even further this time: “There is no humane or legal justification for how the Israeli Defence (sic) Force is conducting this war, pulverising with bombs, missiles and artillery large parts of Gaza, including thousands of homes, schools and hospitals, displacing families and killing Palestinian non-combatants. Much of Gaza has lost its access to water and electricity completely. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. There is never an excuse for deliberate attacks on civilians in conflict. These are war crimes”, wrote Carter and Robinson, who also called for international judicial proceedings “to investigate and end these violations of international law”. The appropriate channel for such an investigation should be the International Criminal Court (ICC) but neither Israel nor its sponsor-in-chief, the United States, accepts the jurisdiction of the ICC, conveniently keeping their personnel beyond the reach of the law. Within Israel, the mood is increasingly hawkish, with some 90% of Jewish Israelis fully supporting the attack on Gaza, and just 4% feeling the slaughter indicated the IDF used “excessive firepower”. A popular view in Israel is that since the people of Gaza voted Hamas into power, the entire population is somehow culpable and therefore subject to the war crime known as ‘collective punishment’. In a

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    Fixing the world

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    Lorna Gold Since mid-2012 talks have been going on under the auspices of the UN to decide what will replace the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015. The new development framework under discussion is to be universally applicable across all countries, rich and poor. This could be described as an exercise in ‘fixing the world’. The sheer scope of this has resulted in feverish ‘issue competition’ between different groups rather than work on a genuine transformative agenda. In 2000, global leaders had signed a Declaration on key priorities for the new millennium. Almost by accident, this Declaration was translated by UN civil servants into the eight Millennium Development Goals. They became the framework which drove international efforts to eradicate poverty in the developing countries through the 2000s. The new global agenda is to serve as a comprehensive framework of objectives to achieve human development and ensure environmental sustainability. The talks are now entering a critical phase, with intergovernmental negotiations due to begin in earnest during the UN General Assembly in September. This post-2015 exercise is fraught with danger for those who believe in a just and sustainable world governed by human rights standards. What exactly is the new framework expected to do? It was one thing to have a set of eight indicative global goals which, however rudimentary or flawed, formed a rallying point for international action. Nobody, for example, can argue that it is not better for donors to be directing aid to eradicating HIV/AIDs than funding Kalashnikovs. It is a whole other matter to have seventeen goals and 169 targets. There are proposals to include goals on governance, equality and gender equality. The Irish government has played a significant role in ensuring that these more intangible goals are included as objectives in their own right and not just as enablers. However, strong human rights approaches are notable for their absence from the “Open Working Group Report” which will eventually become the basis of a text for negotiation. Overarching issues of participation, empowerment, non-discrimination and equality are seen as tangential to the ‘real’ business of delivering and measuring tangible outcomes. Systemic, underlying structures of economic inequality and exclusion, such as tax justice, have been relegated to a section on “means of implementation”. Major multinationals are playing a much more powerful role within the development co-operation sector. Their influence over the Post-2015 process is particularly evident. A report by the Global Policy Forum on “Corporate Influence in the Post-2015 Process” documents the influence that a small number of very powerful multinational companies and business associations are having. Many of the same corporations involved in the Post-2015 negotiations are also involved in economic sectors that are in conflict with human-rights defenders in developing countries. The Global Policy Forum report identifies how the Post-2015 process has become a key moment for re-ordering the international agenda along the lines of the ‘Global Redesign’ advocated at the World Economic Forum. ‘Global Redesign’ would place business at the heart of global governance processes. The influence of business on the framing of the Post-2015 process is potentially subversive of legitimate processes of accountability. This influence blocks out any hope of transformative approaches. As Leo Pingeot writes in the Global Policy Forum report: “The growing corporate engagement and corporate influence on the Post-2015 discourse entail considerable risks and side-effects. They relate, on the one hand, to the messages, problem analyses and proposed solutions, and on the other hand to the promoted governance models”. Private companies have a role to play in building a more sustainable future. However, they tend to advocate for voluntary rather than binding agreements, and public-private partnerships rather than publicly-funded programmes. They focus on growth, market-based solutions and new technology as the solution and fail to recognise that it is exactly this model that got us to where we are today. If there is to be any value in the Post-2015 framework, far greater transparency from multinationals about their aims and methods is needed, including their motivation in supporting UN initiatives. The imperatives are too important to risk indulging their undermining. • Lorna Gold is Head of Policy and Advocacy with Trócaire.

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