NAM Meeting, 19 March 07, 9 am, ALG

This meeting was convened to discuss the three draft decisions entitled: “Human Rights and unilateral coercive measures”, “Enhancement of international cooperation in the field of Human Rights” and “Right to development”.
These three decisions had been postponed from the third Session of the Council of Human Rights to the fourth Session.

The present members accepted the first draft decision (Human Rights and unilateral coercive measures) unanimously and added only the reference to the last report presented by the Secretary General in the first paragraph, third line in the brackets.

Regarding the second draft there were no objections neither. They accepted the updated version.

There were more discussions about the draft resolution on the right to development:

The ambassador of Egypt put very much emphasis on the term “Takes note” on the second paragraph. He wished instead to “the Human Rights Council … welcomes the report of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development at its eighth session”. For him, this was very important because if leaving “takes note”, this would mean that draft would not correspond to what was decided in the last Working Group. He argued that NAM would lack of credibility because they joined a consensus there.
Some delegations tried to relativise this consensus question and argued that writing “welcoming the report” would be much more legally binding. But the ambassador of Egypt insisted very much that if they wanted or not, NAM joined the consensus and therefore they had to change “takes note” to “welcomes”.

For South Africa, it was very important that the work done on this question would bear in mind that the final objective is to establish a Convention on the Right to development.
All the delegations agreed on this point that they want to say clearly that all this is a roadmap to a Convention on the Rights to Development.

In the end, they decided to establish a new draft text which will circulate soon and they will convene on Wednesday, 21 March at 9 am for further discussions.