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The General Assembly of the United Nations has postponed until 24-26 June the planned Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development, which was scheduled for 1-3 June. The high-level summit was agreed at the Financing for Development meeting held in Qatar in 2008, and is intended to propose solutions to the global crisis which take the needs of developing countries into account.
Delegates had requested more time to negotiate the draft outcome document to be adopted at the conference, according to a statement issued by the President of the UN General Assembly Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann. The decision is the result of a deep disagreement following D'Escoto Brockmann's rejecting the draft outcome document prepared by the facilitators and tabling a much more radical draft of outcome document at the last moment, causing some delegates to pull out. Roberto Bissio, Director of Social Watch, hopes that the postponing of the Conference will allow strong participation of European officials. "Different European officers have been giving all kinds of excuses for not confirming high level participation in the UN Conference on the World Crisis and its Impact on Development", he explains. "Now that the Summit has been postponed and does not overlap with European elections, now that the negotiating process has been set on track to reach an agreed outcome by June 15, with enough time to study it, and now that D'Escoto has accepted a less ambitious proposal than the one he initially hoped for, what is keeping governments from committing?" Read Eurostep and partners joint statement "Ensuring development in the face of the financial crisis" (May 2009): http://www.eurostep.org/wcm/dmdocuments/position_paper_FfD_20090505.pdf Sources:
| Other articles in Eurostep Weekly 554, 2 June 2009: |
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