International court issues arrest warrant for Gaddafi (Reuters)

THE HAGUE/TRIPOLI (Reuters) – The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on Monday for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and rebels trying to oust him said their forces had advanced to within 80 km (50 miles) of the capital.

The court approved warrants for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi on charges of crimes against humanity. ICC prosecutors allege they were involved in the killing of civilian protesters who rose up in February against Gaddafi's 41-year rule.

"To prevent them covering up ongoing crimes and committing new crimes, they should be arrested. This is the only way to protect civilians in Libya," said ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who had sought the arrest warrants.

The ruling is unlikely to lead to Gaddafi's arrest as long he remains in power and inside Libya, because the court does not have the power to enforce its warrants.

Celebrations erupted in the rebel-held city of Benghazi, in eastern Libya, after the ICC ruling. People honked their car horns, waved flags, fired shots into the air and flashed victory signs in the street.

The ICC decision invalidated any notion of having negotiations with Gaddafi, insurgent officials said.

Gaddafi's government denies targeting civilians, saying it took action against armed criminal gangs and al Qaeda militants. It says NATO should be prosecuted instead for killing civilians with its bombing campaign.

Anti-Gaddafi rebels, based in the Western Mountains region southwest of Tripoli, made their biggest breakthrough in weeks to reach the town of Bir al-Ghanam, where they are now fighting pro-Gaddafi forces for control, their spokesman said.

The advance took them about 30 km (18 miles) north from their previous position and closer to Tripoli, Gaddafi's biggest power base.

A senior United Nations official said the war on the ground was started to shift in favor of the insurgents, who for weeks have been bogged down in battles with Gaddafi's forces.

"While we do not have a detailed understanding of the military situation on the ground, it is clear that the initiative, although halting, is now with the opposition forces, supported at times by NATO air power," the U.N. under secretary-general for political affairs, Lynn Pascoe, told the U.N. Security Council.

BLOODY REVOLT

The rebels -- backed by NATO air support -- have been battling Gaddafi's forces since late February, when thousands of people rebelled, prompting a fierce crackdown by Gaddafi's security forces.

The revolt has turned into the bloodiest of the Arab Spring revolts against autocratic rulers rippling across the Middle East.

"We are on the southern and western outskirts of Bir al-Ghanam," Juma Ibrahim, a rebel spokesman in the nearby town of Zintan, said by telephone.

"There were battles there most of yesterday. Some of our fighters were martyred and they (government forces) also suffered casualties and we captured equipment and vehicles. It's quiet there today and the rebels are still in their positions."

A Reuters reporter in the center of Tripoli heard at least two loud explosions on Monday coming from the direction of Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound, repeatedly targeted by NATO.

Later, government officials took reporters to the compound. They showed them a burned-out bus which, they said, belonged to Gaddafi and had been hit by two NATO missiles.

ISOLATION

Gaddafi is the second sitting head of state to have an ICC arrest warrant issued against him. The previous one was Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Securing arrests, however, has proven difficult for the ICC, which has no police force and relies on member states to enforce arrest orders. Some states have refused to arrest Bashir, who is still able to travel to friendly states.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the court's ruling reinforced the reasons for the alliance's bombing campaign and deepened Gaddafi's isolation.

"(Gaddafi) and his henchmen need to realize that time is rapidly running out for them," Rasmussen said in a statement.

"NATO is more determined than ever to keep up the pressure until all attacks on civilians have ended, until all regime forces have returned to their bases and until there is unhindered access to humanitarian aid."

Reading out the ruling at the court in The Hague, presiding judge Sanji Mmasenono Monageng said Gaddafi has "absolute, ultimate and unquestioned control" over Libya's state apparatus and security forces.

She said both Gaddafi and Saif al-Islam "conceived and orchestrated a plan to deter and quell by all means the civilian demonstrations" against the regime and that al-Senussi used his position of command to have attacks carried out.

Gaddafi's administration made no immediate comment on the ICC ruling. Speaking on Sunday, government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said the court was guilty of double standards and was following a Western political agenda.

"The ICC has no legitimacy whatsoever," Ibrahim told reporters.

In Benghazi, in eastern Libya, the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) said the arrest warrants rendered any attempt at peace talks with Gaddafi pointless.

"After this warrant, it is all irrelevant. We cannot negotiate with war criminals," NTC spokesman Jalal al-Galal told Reuters. "The world has confirmed what we have been saying all along. He's a war criminal, and he should be tried for it."

"We are extremely happy that the whole world has united in prosecuting Gaddafi for the crimes he has committed," Galal said. "The people feel vindicated by such a response."

Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the council chairman, urged Gaddafi's aides and supporters to abandon him, saying those who help him escape justice will end up sharing his punishment. "It is time to abandon Gaddafi to spare themselves," he added.

In neighboring Tunisia, three Libyan ministers, including the foreign minister, were holding talks with "foreign parties," the Tunisian state news agency reported, in a possible sign some in Gaddafi's circle were seeking a settlement.

(Additional reporting by Joseph Nasr in Berlin, Tarek Amara in Tunis, Hamid Ould Ahmed in Algiers, Maria Golovnina in Benghazi, Sherine El Madany in Cairo, Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations and David Brunnstrom in Brussels; writing by Christian Lowe; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Yahoo! News

Population experts demand funding for international family planning (OneWorld.net)

LONDON, May 30 (OneWorld.net) - A high-level population conference has appealed to international donors to step up financial support for family planning and reproductive health services in developing countries.

This call comes at a time when foreign aid for international family planning is one of the most divisive topics for US Congress to resolve in its FY2012 budget considerations. The US is the key global donor in this field.

Described by its organizers at University College London as the largest conference on population issues to be held this year, Population Footprints examined the capacity of the planet to sustain a human presence which is due to reach seven billion in October.

The six billion threshold was passed just 12 years ago. Earlier this month, the UN published an upward revision of its long term projections of global population.

Academics, campaigners and politicians attending the conference from around the world discussed what strategies might encourage a lower population trajectory. They addressed the troubling contexts of food security, climate change, migration and a skewed demographic profile in which richer countries have too few people of working age whilst the poorer countries have too many.

The debates were marked by disagreements between the participants, a point acknowledged in the closing summary by Professor Anthony Costello, Co-Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health.

"That doesn't matter," he said, "because what unites us is much greater. What unites all of us is that funding for women's health, maternal health, child health, fertility reduction, family planning - all the drivers for moving towards a stable population - is desperately needed."

Describing current global funding as "derisory", Professor Costello deplored that "the World Health Organization has seen its budget halved for reproductive health and family planning."

A downward trend in this area of funding was indeed a feature of the April compromise which saw Congress approve the US budget for FY2011. International aid for family planning and reproductive health was cut by 5% to $615 million.

The battle now turns to FY2012. President Obama's original request for $769 million will be subject to forces pulling strongly in both directions.

The objective to provide universal global access to reproductive health services by 2015 is included in the Millennium Development Goals, a set of commitments agreed by world governments.

There are 215 million women in developing countries with an unmet need for contraception. The cost of fulfilling this area of reproductive health alone is estimated at $3.6 billion.

Campaigners say that it is impossible to achieve the MDG target without significant new donor funding. They advocate that US support should rise towards $1 billion per annum.

However, many Republican members of Congress considered the FY2011 compromise to be too generous. They will press for further cuts for FY2012.

The UN Population Fund is a favored target. Its US support for FY2011 was slashed from $55 million to $40 million. Republicans are under lobby pressure to revert to the days of the Bush Administration when UNFPA was denied funding altogether.

The new Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, was a leading participant in the Population Footprints conference. Whilst he maintained a diplomatic silence on his budgetary relationship with the US government, Dr Osotimehin was unambiguous in his views about priorities for population policies. "If we protect women's rights, their ability to make choices, we will see a lot of difference in population," he told the conference.

The Ugandan Minister of State for Finance and Planning, Professor Ephraim Kamuntu, presented the same opinion in language designed to appeal to politicians, hard-pressed on delivering budgetary value for money. "We have done a study in Uganda which shows for every $1 you invest in reproductive health it saves you $3 eventually in health costs that result from non-spacing of children and complications in giving birth," he said.

Africa's rate of population growth is the highest of the world's continents, its numbers projected to double to 2 billion by 2050. But attitudes are changing, according to Eliya Zulu, Director of the African Institute for Development Policy.

"Unlike 15-20 years ago, more African people now want to limit their family size but they are not doing that because they do not have access to family planning," he said in a BBC World Service interview at the conference.

Several speakers referred to the long term decline in foreign aid for family planning. This trend was evidenced in a scrupulously factual presentation by Hania Zlotnik, Director of the UN Population Division. She demonstrated that, since 1996, donor assistance for family planning programmes has fallen by at least 50% in nearly all African countries.

"In most high fertility countries, contraceptive prevalence is increasing by less than 1% per year," she said. "At that rate it's going to take something like 30-40 years for them to meet the unmet need they already have."

Dr Mairo Mandara, a gynecologist from Nigeria, highlighted the extremes that exist in the poorest regions of the continent. In northern Nigeria, the average age at which girls are married is just 15. Only 3% have access to contraception. Nigeria's population of 158 million is the highest in Africa.

The Nigerian government has taken the initiative of embarking on its own programme of free family planning services. "Africa should fund family planning, not rely only on donors," Eliya Zulu told his followers on Twitter.

The share of funding between potential donors was not tackled in any detail but speakers were unwavering in their view of the priority for spending. Siri Tellier, former Director of UNFPA in Geneva, summed it up in population numbers: "the use of family planning will be the most important determinant in whether we go to 11 billion in 2050 or whether we go to 9 billion in 2050."

The Population Footprints conference was sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust and The Lancet medical journal.

* More Information:

Population Footprints - archived videos of the UCL conference

OneWorld Population Guide

OneWorld Gender and Development Guide

Yahoo! News

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.