PRESS CONFERENCE BY CHAIRMAN OF GROUP OF 77

The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change could be ratified by enough countries to make it enter into force next year, Ambassador Bagher Asadi, Iran, Chairman of the "Group of 77" developing countries (G-77) said this morning, as he briefed correspondents at Headquarters on the outcome of the Marrakech Conference on that Protocol, as well as the upcoming G-77 Ministerial Meeting.

“The embattled Kyoto Protocol, pronounced dead sometime back in the spring, is very much alive,” Mr. Asadi said.  The Marrakech meeting, which took place from 29 October to 9 November and was officially titled the Seventh Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP-7) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), had reached agreement on all outstanding issues in critical areas.  Preserving the integrity of the Bonn Agreements, he said, it developed a consensus on legal language for the five remaining topics, including compliance and mechanisms of implementation.

Close cooperation between the Group of 77 and the European Union had saved the day, he said, ensuring the Protocol could be ratified.  Sealing the deal, however, entailed concessions to Japan and the Russian Federation, which were regrettable but unavoidable in the circumstances.  Both countries have since expressed their intent to ratify.

From the point of view of the developing world, he said, the most important feature of the Marrakech agreement was the content of the compliance regime, which was fully agreed upon.  Those countries were also generally satisfied with the mechanisms of implementation, (particularly with the Clean Development Mechanism and reporting regimes of Annex I parties), which were called for on an annual and periodic basis.  The sensitive and divisive issue of “new commitments for developing countries” was postponed until future sessions.

Apart from its substantive and technical achievements, he said, the Marrakech agreement represented a triumph of multilateralism and international cooperation.  It became definitively clear, first in Bonn and then in Marrakech, that the overwhelming majority of the international community was committed to the finalization of a four-year process of negotiation on the implementation of the protocol.  The success of the Climate Change Convention itself, a ten-year process, had been at stake.  “The message from COP-7 to the outside world,” he said, is a good, solid and encouraging message.  “International cooperation and multilateral negotiation works.”

In regard to the G-77 Ministerial Meeting, Mr. Asadi said that the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the foreign ministers of the Group of 77 would take place in New York tomorrow, 16 November.  It was originally scheduled for late September, as in other years, but had to be rescheduled, along with the general debate of the General Assembly.

On the agenda of tomorrow’s meeting, he said, there would be a general debate on critical issues, election of the Chairman for the year 2002 and adoption of the Ministerial Statement.  The most important issue of that the meeting would be the International Conference on Financing for Development, to be held in Mexico next March.  That meeting would be chaired by Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi of Iran and would be addressed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme.