With three more days to go, we have been told that each day a limited number of people will be allowed inside regardless of all the tickets and passes we have spent hours standing in line to get. By Thursday only 1,000 people who are not part or attached to the direct delegations who are on the floor negotiating will even be allowed into the building and they have yet to even determine how those allowed in will be chosen. By Friday the number drops to 90 although petitions are circulating that may raise the number to as many as 450. The word is that the delegates themselves have requested that as few civil society as possible be allowed in because they have not achieved in these two weeks what they want to present to “the public” and therefore will have to be conducting ad hoc negotiations during the plenary – not something they want to be public. Many have side events planned and are having to move them at considerable expense.

The mood inside is tense as each group tries to have something their head of state will approve as they arrive tomorrow and Thursday.  Impasses surround monitorning issues top the list with China and the US facing off.

Our health delegation, a small but mighty band, moves forward. Last week’s EPA ruling is the impetus for the almost entirely European group (except me, in fact) to concur that the best approach to getting health on the agenda is through the American delegation. What irony. I met this morning with World Health Organization representatives and those from HEAL in Brussels and Healthcare Without Harm – the leading players in the health delegation. 

The Health Meeting

They ask good questions about tactics for influencing ministers working on the current drafts and in looking to the future about getting health more purposefully on the agenda, but really need some good marketing counseling — as in, what’s in it for the people you are trying to influence not just making your point in a new way.  I agree with one of the members this morning who said we may be looking down the “wrong end of the telescope.”

On a brighter note, yours truly was able to get health as a key issue inserted into one of the 6 official documents from delegate constituencies, the research NGO group (RINGO) to which I belong. I was quite happy about that. The very word “health” has been bracketed in the draft text of what is now being negotiated which means it will be deleted. What is contentious about wanting to protect health?

Hopefully I will get in tomorrow to continue working from the inside. One of the RINGOs asked for a formal statement that the NGOs have been treated poorly (which we have) and that it is “unacceptable” and cannot be so in the future, using the rhetoric heard on the floor. The constituency responded that it was not the UN’s fault but rather the host county, Denmark, so we had to couch our statements carefully if at all? I am suspect of that message, that the UN is not a fault and believe it to be an effort not to irritate the big gorilla. However, I will be here at 0:dark thirty in the morning to make my best effort to get inside. It worked today, but each day the rules change.

Advertisement