Access Denied: UN Restrictions Grow

Photo Credit: Aaron Thom

This morning Katherine Dykes of MIT attempted to register at the Bella Center.  As it turns out, registration has been completely closed to NGOs, one more restriction following a series of measures taken by the UN to limit access to the Bella Center.  As of this afternoon, even NGOs with both the primary registration complete and a secondary pass were no longer allowed inside.  You can see the video of us being kicked out of security here (Video Credit: Aaron Thom).  What confuses me is how they somehow have arrived at the logic that they should cope with “security incidents” they are linking to NGOs by restricting NGOs further.

What has been going on recently?

This morning protesters surrounded the Bella Center and were beat back by police in their attempts to enter the Center and reach the delegates. 

To be perfectly frank, being physically inside the Bella Center does not bring you any closer to being part of the negotiations.  The fact of the matter is however, that citizens have traveled from across the world with the expectation that they would be able to attend this conference that is deciding their future only to be turned away in the conference’s final moments. There chances of visiting the offices of different nations or getting any sort of chance to observe the official COP negotiations is now roughly 0.0. This conference has cost them weeks of time (longer if you include planning time), thousands of dollars, and resulted in an estimated total of 120,000 tonnes of CO₂ (I extrapolated this for the actual number of attendants based on the UNFCCC’s estimate for 15,000 attendants).  To put it in perspective, the nation of Somalia emits roughly 50,000 tonnes per year.

In order to try to make amends for some of the loss, the Danish government has moved the conference, or the NGO-portion of it at least, to the Forum conference hall (no this is not that close to the Bella Center). Here, any NGOs that decide to continue to host their booths and events may do so.  A few of us will be entering this forum tomorrow, and we’ll see how it goes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 1:26 am and is filed under Policy & Governance, Student Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.