The organization responsible for managing a global cap-and-trade system worth billions of dollars for carbon emissions projects around the world is trying to get sweeping legal immunities for its actions, even as it plans to expand its activities dramatically in the wake of the United Nations’ Rio + 20 summit on sustainable development, which starts June 20.

Despite its name, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, legal experts ruled in 2006 that it was not to be part of the U.N. system of organizations that has enjoyed diplomatic and legal immunities since the end of World War II. Now, it is scrambling to figure out how to get them. A meeting of a UNFCCC subsidiary in Bonn last month agreed to forward a new draft treaty covering the issue to another meeting in November.

Internal UNFCCC documents, examined by Fox News, show that among other things, top officials hope to use those immunities to avoid challenges in the future based on such things as:

▪ Possible conflicts of interest in their duties,

▪ Breaches of confidentiality in their work,

▪ Violations of the due process rights of those affected by UNFCCC actions,

▪ Making decisions or actions that are beyond the legal mandate of the organization or its subsidiaries.

The Bonn-based UNFCCC is responsible, among other things, for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the cap and trade emissions system created by the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. has not ratified. In the wake of Rio + 20, UNFCCC also hopes to manage a mammoth Green Climate Fund, intended to help mobilize as much as $100 billion a year for projects to lower global greenhouse gases.

The Obama Administration has strongly supported creation of the Green Climate Fund, and remains heavily involved in UNFCCC activities surrounding the Kyoto Protocol, including plans to deepen the cuts in global carbon emissions in the years ahead.

The CDM’s record so far, however, at doing the job it is supposed to do is deeply unimpressive to many. A study by consultants for the European Commission last December critiqued the mechanism for “lack of transparency,” “inconsistency of decisions,” “conflicts of interest,” and extensive support for “unsustainable technology for emissions reduction.”

In other words, the consultants accused the Kyoto mechanism of a number of the same things that the UNFCCC hopes to avoid through the adoption of broader immunities.

A Brussels-based non-government organization named CDM-Watch, which says it is sponsored by the British government s Department for International Development and the International Climate Protection Initiative of the Federal Environment Ministry of Germany, among others, issued its own scathing critique of the Kyoto mechanism at a UNFCCC climate conference in Durban, South Africa, last December..

Among other things, CDM-Watch claimed that anywhere from 40 percent to 70 percent of CDM projects removed no additional carbon from the atmosphere, that CDM projects “have been known to cause social and environmental harm,” and that only the say-so of governments that host UNFCCC projects is involved in declaring whether the projects actually contribute to “sustainable development.”

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Editor's Note: Everything the United Nations produces is special interest in nature, socialist/globalist in ideology and sovereignty killing by deed. The UN has over-reached its charter and intent and should be diminished to a forum whose singular purpose is dialogue between nations; no programs, no authority at all.


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