ANKARA: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan praised a deal reached with Australia on Saturday to host next year’s UN climate summit, calling the compromise a meaningful achievement for multilateralism.
Resolving a lengthy standoff, the two countries agreed that Turkiye will host the COP31 summit in 2026 while Australia leads the negotiation process. Ankara and Canberra both bid in 2022 to host the conference and had since refused to stand down.
“Taking into consideration that multilateralism has in recent times lost ground, I find this agreement that we reached with Australia to be meaningful,” Erdogan told an event at the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg on Saturday evening.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday that his country would have “exclusive authority in relation to the negotiations” guiding decision-making at the summit.
In a statement, Albanese said the Pacific region would host a special pre-COP meeting to bring “attention to the existential threat climate change poses to the region.”
A bloc of 18 Pacific Island nations, many at risk from rising seas, had backed Australia’s bid.
“Hundreds of bilateral meetings, climate-oriented visits to tens of countries, days of diplomatic negotiations. And finally Turkiye is the COP31 President and Host!,” Turkiye’s minister of environment, urbanization and climate change, Murat Kurum, posted on X late on Saturday.
“As Turkiye, we guarantee to organize a fair and balanced conference of the parties, focusing not only on our own region but also on fragile regions such as the Pacific and Africa, connecting the north and the south,” he later said in a separate statement from the COP30 meeting in Brazil.
The annual COP conference is the main global forum for driving action on climate change.
Turkiye’s Erdogan praises ‘meaningful’ deal with Australia on hosting COP31 summit
https://arab.news/zp6q4
Turkiye’s Erdogan praises ‘meaningful’ deal with Australia on hosting COP31 summit
- A bloc of 18 Pacific Island nations, many at risk from rising seas, had backed Australia’s bid
France investigates two Franco-Israelis for ‘complicity in genocide’
- The warrants were issued in July last year for Nili Kupfer-Naouri of the Israel is Forever group and Rachel Touitou of the Tsav 9 group, the source close to the investigation told AFP following a French media report
PARIS: French authorities have issued warrants for two Franco-Israeli nationals for “complicity in genocide” over allegations that they tried to stop humanitarian aid entering conflict stricken Gaza, a legal source said Monday.
According to a lawyer for the NGOs that made a legal complaint last year, it is the first time that a country has considered the blocking of aid as possible “complicity in genocide.”
The warrants were issued in July last year for Nili Kupfer-Naouri of the Israel is Forever group and Rachel Touitou of the Tsav 9 group, the source close to the investigation told AFP following a French media report.
The warrants call for the two to appear before an investigating magistrate but not for their detention.
The pair are accused of seeking to block aid trucks entering Gaza between January and November 2024 and in May last year at the Nitzana and Kerem Shalom frontier posts.
Olivier Pardo, a lawyer for Kupfer-Naouri, said the “pacifist” actions sought to condemn the “hijacking” of humanitarian aid by Hamas and other groups that launched the October 7, 2023 attacks that set off the Gaza war.
“If peacefully demonstrating with an Israeli flag against a terrorist organization seizing humanitarian aid, diverting it, and reselling it at exorbitant prices to Gazans is a crime — then there is no need to look down on the mullahs, France is Iran!” said Touitou, 34, on her social media account.
In an interview with The News website, Kupfer-Naouri, 50, called the French investigation “anti-semitic madness.”
Pardo said Kupfer-Naouri was in Israel but was ready to speak to French investigators there.
The two activists are also suspected of “public provocation for genocide” by calling for aid to be prevented from reaching Gaza, the source said.
Another source close to the investigation said warrants could be issued for about 10 other people.
The complaints were made last year by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the rights groups Al-Haq and Al-Mezan. Clemence Bectarte, a lawyer for the groups, said it was the first investigation of its kind in genocide law.
Other legal complaints have also been made in France for “war crimes” over the deaths of Franco-Palestinian children in Gaza in an Israeli bombing raid and against two Franco-Israeli soldiers who took part in operations in the territory.
Another complaint is over the Hamas attack that set off the war.
