Civil G8 2006

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Expert Opinion

Bill Pace


World Federalist Movement - Institute for Global Policy



Speech at 'Delivering the 2006 G8 Agenda' final international NGO conference

I’m representing here two groups – the World Federalist Movement - Institute for Global Policy and the Coalition for International Criminal Courts. I represent international non-governmental organization that has worked in the area of peace and international law for 60 years. Many of us were dealing with creating the commission for sustainable development that I think has not been successful. The International Criminal Court in which the civil society coalition has been spectacular was successful.

We also have important projects now on genocide prevention and we are continuing the follow-up of the 2005 UN reform in particular in a new peace-building commission and the security counsel reforms.

I was unable to attend the meeting in July because we have established a civil society” formal consultations with the judges of the International Criminal Court and it coincided. And I came today because I was able to finish the annual meeting. And during the last 10 days I had more than 200 members of civil society from about 55 countries working for the governing body of international criminal courts. So, the civil society was the largest delegation and the most effective and productive.
These meeting and the G8 process remind me too often of a story of famous doctors which joined together to conduct a very complicated and long, multi-hours surgical operation and afterwards were complimenting each other but when asked about the patient they said: “Oh, unfortunately he died”.

The G8 is an exclusive and ad hoc informal mechanism. Ithink it is good that it is informal mechanism of global governments. It’s important for the governments even for most powerful economic governments to meet and have dialogue and discussions. But I think it would be a big mistake for the civil society to encourage any formal proposals for the G8 to become some global governments’ mechanism with legitimacy.

I think it’s also important for the civil society to try to limit the achievements we want to achieve at any particular meeting, because if we want this economic conference to cover everything within the agenda then we will have the lowest and most general results. I think we should better concentrate at a few issues.

I’m not an academic expert or theoretician. My organization has developed expertise in forming coalition on pressing global issues. Especially, in focusing global governments in trying to democratize global governments in the process.

It’s important to note that even great national democracies are often the most fierce opponents of more transparency, openness, rights and participation in international governments. My organizations’ work is limited we’ve found an effective strategy in global campaigns of international criminal courts, for example. We are securing concrete achievements including a partnership between civil societies of the South and the North but we are also having informal partnership with small and middle-power governments from the South and the North. The G8 is not a framework for this kind of policy.

I hope that we’ll be very careful and treat the G8 as an informal ad hoc mechanism of powerful governments. I also hope the civil society is moving forward and we’ll try 2 or 3 issues we want to achieve at the summit. Because this would be probably the most effective way to go forward and we know all the groups will not be happy if they try to do everything.

Expert opinion

Halter Marek

02.12.06

Halter Marek
Le College de France
Olivier Giscard d’Estaing

02.12.06

Olivier Giscard d’Estaing
COPAM, France
Mika Ohbayashi

02.12.06

Mika Ohbayashi
Institute for Sustainable Energy Poliñy
Bill Pace

02.12.06

Bill Pace
World Federalist Movement - Institute for Global Policy
Peter I. Hajnal

01.12.06

Peter I. Hajnal
Toronto University, G8 Research Group


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