Climate Negotiations
in smaller groups, there was no precedent – nor diplomatic protocol – for similar arrangements involving heads of state. The Presidency’s next controversial step was to convene
a ‘high-level informal event’ during the last day’s plenary inviting an even more carefully selected group of leaders to address the conference (and the rest of the heads of state). The event was probably designed with the best intentions, giving a platform for all the major negotiating groups to state their positions and emphasise the need to reach an agreement. Normally, however, the addresses made at the high-level session are not discriminatory, all speakers (usually ministers) are given a time slot and the speeches drag out for two days. The Danish Presidency tried to organise an ‘informal’ event that would break-away from the strict confi nes of the UNFCCC procedures and in doing so it risked bruising the egos of those it did not invite. Cuban ex-president Fidel Castro was reported in the press
as having said that the Danish government had off ered the “conference’s plenary hall to US President Obama for a meeting where only he and a selected group of guests, 16 in all, had the exclusive right to speak”. The ‘informal event’ of the Danish Presidency was the climax
of the conference’s breakdown, staging the fi nal show-down which led to the failure to reach a formal agreement. The conveners apparently tried to decline the fl oor to those world leaders that they did not select to address the conference – most notably Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Then, just as Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister for Climate Change, was wrapping up the event, the Venezuelan delegation pressed a button on their table demanding an intervention. Clearly Hugo Chavez felt snubbed by the US and the EU,
and he did not take it lightly. As he put it “there are no fi rst- rank Presidents and second-rank Presidents here, this is the UN”. Whatever it was that tipped him over the edge in the end – attempts by the Danish Presidency to prevent him from speaking, the unhappiness of his delegation with the process or the substance (the developing country delegations are rather small after all), resentment towards the huge role the US played in the negotiations and the personal leadership of President Obama, thirst for attention, or something else entirely – he went up to the podium on the last day of the conference and announced he was leaving the conference without a deal. Anybody familiar with the UN process knows that all
delegations have mandates. If your President says the previous day that he is leaving the conference without an agreement, and conducts a press-conference to that eff ect, that is your mandate. And that became the mandate of the delegations from Venezuela and Bolivia (and, indeed, Cuba, whose foreign minister joined the press conference) from the moment Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s President Morales departed the
worldPower 2010
Bella Center in Copenhagen. Everything that followed was predictable, although possibly preventable. In the heat of the fi nal hours, when the deal appeared to be within reach, and when the substantive issues were yet to be resolved, nobody noticed that two delegations had lost their mandates to agree to any deal coming out of the high-level meetings to which their leaders were not invited. Without a mandate to agree anything, there was nothing
left for them to do, other than put on a show to demonstrate their hard work to those back home. The show had to be dramatic and impressive: Venezuela’s lead negotiator Claudia Salerno Caldera cut her hand and raised it, blood dripping, to request the fl oor, the UN Secretary General was called on as a witness to the events several times. It was a show for the audience that the majority of those present in the plenary were not even aware existed. The initial position of the delegations of Venezuela, Bolivia
and Cuba on the Copenhagen Accord was that the document should not be recognised under the UNFCCC process, that it should be tabled as a submission of the parties who have negotiated it; a miscellaneous document. Agreeing to the document’s listing as an attachment to a COP decision with a process for the countries to associate themselves with the agreement was a generous compromise, enabled
without
doubt by the personal intervention
of
the UN Secretary General Ban Ki- moon. In the fi nal hours
of the conference, just before Peter Weelch of the Bahamas re-opened the meeting after it was adjourned by the Danish Prime Minister, the camera focused on the UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon, holding a document and instructing Peter Weelch on what to say. When the meeting was opened, the document was gaveled in within seconds, before the rest of the parties had time to realise what had been agreed. The deal was referenced twice in the discussion that
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