Latest news with #LuizInácioLuladaSilva
Saba Yemen
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Saba Yemen
Brazil nears joining Gaza genocide case at ICJ
Brasília - Saba: The Brazilian Foreign Ministry announced on Wednesday that it is in the final stages of submitting a formal request to join the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding its military actions in the Gaza Strip. In a statement cited by Quds Press, the ministry stressed that the ongoing atrocities in Gaza cannot be met with international silence. It emphasized that the global community must not remain idle in the face of violations against civilians in the besieged enclave. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated on Tuesday that Israel is committing "genocide" in Gaza, clarifying that the situation is "not a war" but rather a systematic killing of civilians, particularly women and children. Latin American Nations Join South Africa's Case Five Latin American countries have successively joined the lawsuit filed by South Africa at the ICJ, accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinian civilians in Gaza during its continuous aggression since October 7, 2023. - Nicaragua was the first Latin American country to take this step, formally submitting a request to the court on February 16, 2024, to join as a "third party." It argued that Israel's actions in Gaza violate the 1948 Genocide Convention and called for accountability. - Colombia filed a similar request on April 5, 2024, stating its aim was to "defend the Palestinian people's right to life and dignity" and ensure accountability for crimes against civilians. - Chile submitted its formal request on September 13, 2024, following President Gabriel Boric's announcement in June that Chile would support South Africa's legal efforts, calling Gaza's humanitarian tragedy a matter requiring decisive legal action. - Bolivia officially joined the case on October 9, 2024, expressing full support for legal measures to hold Israel accountable. - Cuba intervened on January 13, 2025, submitting a declaration in support of South Africa's call for accountability over "grave and systematic violations of international humanitarian law." Brazil is now set to become the sixth Latin American country to join the case. ICJ's Provisional Measures On January 26, 2024, the ICJ issued provisional measures ordering Israel to take all possible steps to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza, including ensuring humanitarian aid access and preventing incitement to hatred. While the court has not yet ruled on the case's merits, it found South Africa's claims "plausible enough" to warrant urgent measures—a legal basis that prompted multiple countries to intervene. South Africa filed the lawsuit on December 29, 2023, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention through its military operations in Gaza, which have killed tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children. Whatsapp Telegram Email Print more of (International)
Observer
2 days ago
- Politics
- Observer
Brazil's moment to lead on forest conservation
With greenhouse-gas emissions still rising globally and nature loss continuing apace, the Amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point. To avert climate catastrophe, the world must make rapid and significant progress on protecting forests and building a sustainable, inclusive bioeconomy. And Brazil must lead the way, starting at this November's United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém. The Amazon represents one of the planet's most powerful defences against climate change. It is more than a carbon sink; it is a reservoir of biodiversity, a regulator of rainfall across South America, and a vital component of our planet's climate system. As the custodian of nearly 60 per cent of the Amazon, Brazil has not only a responsibility to be a good steward, but also an opportunity to demonstrate global leadership at a pivotal moment for people and the planet. Brazil seems to recognise this. The government's renewed commitment to forest protection, under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration, is reflected in a sharp decline in deforestation rates. But this is just the beginning. Brazil is also working to deliver the bold ideas, scalable finance, and robust partnerships that the global green transformation demands. Nature-based solutions — which simultaneously advance environmental imperatives and ensure sustainable economic growth — are central to this effort. Recognising that the preservation of existing nature produces the fastest, most cost-effective results, these solutions are typically based on three pillars: protect, restore, and manage. To protect forests, Brazil is advancing innovative approaches, both domestically and internationally. At home, the country is helping to pioneer a jurisdictional approach, which links carbon finance to state-level action to protect forests, as part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's framework for 'reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries' (REDD+). Brazil's jurisdictional REDD+ programmes reward regions for reducing deforestation, enhancing forest carbon stocks, and ensuring that benefits reach indigenous peoples and local communities. The state of Tocantins is a worthy example: its forest-protection programme, which aims to generate high-integrity carbon credits, has been shaped by inclusive public consultations and features strong governance. An initial issuance of jurisdictional REDD+ credits is expected early next year. At the international level, Brazil has proposed a $125 billion Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which would reward developing countries with historically low rates of deforestation and compensate them for upholding good stewardship. Unlike carbon markets, which focus on verified reductions in emissions, the TFFF would provide predictable, long-term payments to countries based on the number of hectares conserved. These two approaches are highly complementary. Jurisdictional programmes address the imperative of reducing deforestation now through performance-based finance, while the TFFF offers the steady, long-term support that is needed to sustain those gains. Together, they correct a critical market failure: the undervaluing of standing forests. Forest protection is not easy: it demands rigorous oversight, transparent benefit-sharing, and unwavering community engagement. But when done right, it can unlock significant climate finance, catalyse private-sector participation, and drive sustainable development. The Race to Belém initiative, of which I am CEO, aims to make the most of this potential by mobilising a huge amount of private-sector investment for forest protection in advance of COP30. But protection is only the first pillar. Brazil is also making strides in nature restoration and sustainable land management. It has set a number of ambitious goals, including restoring 12 million hectares of forested areas by 2030; converting 40 million hectares of degraded pastureland into productive systems for food, biofuels, and high-productivity forests over the next decade; and promoting a bioeconomy that respects nature and people. The Brazil Restoration and Bioeconomy Finance Coalition, which seeks to mobilise $10 billion in private investment by 2030, underscores the growing role of the business sector in this process. Far from just another diplomatic gathering, COP30 is shaping up to be a defining moment for climate action – and, in particular, forest preservation, restoration, and management. With Belém located on the edge of the Amazon, delegates will be immersed in the landscape they seek to protect. More importantly, their host will present them with a menu of proven nature-based solutions – behind which political momentum and private-sector support are already building – that address the many causes of forest loss. The foundations for transformative action are already in place. The challenge will be for Brazil to build on its success in harnessing national policy, sub-national action, and private-sector engagement to accelerate progress and spearhead a new global model of climate action. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. Keith Tuffley, Tuffley, a former head of investment banking, partner, and board member at Goldman Sachs Australia, is CEO of Race to Belém, a group campaigning to raise finance for forest protection in Brazil.
Time of India
6 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Brazil's Lula Breathes FIRE At Trump For Tariff ‘Blackmail'
Tensions escalated between Brazil and the U.S. as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemned Donald Trump's threat to impose 50% tariffs on Brazilian exports. Calling the move "unacceptable blackmail," Lula firmly rejected Trump's justification—which cited Brazil's treatment of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro and alleged unfair trade practices. Speaking to student activists in Goias, Lula defiantly declared, "No gringo is going to give orders to this president." He also signaled Brazil's intent to regulate U.S. tech companies, accusing them of spreading violence and disinformation under the guise of free speech. Read More
NZ Herald
6 days ago
- Business
- NZ Herald
In an increasingly multipolar world, most countries don't want to choose sides between hegemons
It was an agreement between Chinese and Brazilian state-backed companies to begin the first steps towards building a rail line that would connect Brazil's Atlantic coast to a Chinese-built deepwater port on Peru's Pacific coast. If built, the roughly 4500km line could transform large parts of Brazil and its neighbours, speeding goods to and from Asian markets. It was a neat illustration of the contrasting approaches China and the US have taken to their growing rivalry. China offers countries help building a new rail line; Trump bullies them and meddles in their politics. The surreal first six months of Trump's second stint as president have offered up endless drama, danger and intrigue. By that standard his tussle with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's President, seems like small beer. But it was a revealing moment, illuminating how Trump's recklessness compounds America's central foreign policy problem of the past two decades. How should the US execute an elegant dismount from its increasingly unsustainable place atop a crumbling global order? And how can it midwife a new order that protects American interests and prestige without bearing the cost, in blood and treasure, of military and economic primacy? These are difficult, thorny questions. Yet instead of answers, Trump offers threats, tantrums and tariffs, to the profound detriment of American interests. China's astonishing economic rise, coupled with its turn toward deeper authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping, has made answering these challenges more difficult. China now seems to most of the American foreign policy establishment, and even more so to Trump, too powerful to be left unconfronted by the US. This line of thinking risks missing America's best and most easily leveraged asset in the tussle for global dominance with China: Most countries don't want to choose sides between hegemons. They prefer a world of benign and open competition in which the US plays an important, if less dominant, role. Nowhere is that truer, perhaps, than Brazil. A vast nation, bigger than the contiguous United States, it is a good stand-in for many of the world's middle powers. Contrary to the famous quip that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be, it has managed to become the world's 10th-largest economy, just a whisker smaller than Canada. It has a long tradition of hedging its relationships with a range of big powers — the US, China and the European Union — while trying to advance its ambition to be a key player in world affairs. As America's position as the sole superpower has waned and Brazilian leaders have vied to shape an increasingly multipolar landscape, those efforts have picked up. That has involved, unquestionably, a deepening of its economic and diplomatic relationship with China, its biggest trading partner. Lula travelled to Beijing in May for his third bilateral meeting with Xi since returning to the presidency in 2023, declaring that 'our relationship with China will be indestructible'. The two countries are founding members of the Brics group, a bloc of mostly developing middle-income countries that includes a number of American antagonists — Russia and, more recently, Iran. American officials have long been wary of Brics, which has sought in various, mostly marginal ways to thwart American power. But Trump has been outright antagonistic. Last week, as Lula played host to the Brics summit, Trump blasted off a social media post threatening to slap additional tariffs on any nation 'aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS.' This aggression is hard to square with the milquetoast statements that came out of Brics, which predictably condemned the bombing of Iran and its nuclear sites but pointedly avoided naming the countries that carried it out, Israel and the US. While member countries have increased trade among themselves, helping Russia elude Western sanctions, the bloc has made almost no progress on its declared intention of introducing a shared currency to counter the dollar. It is a loose and sometimes fractious group, basically a talking shop. Some countries within Brics would like the organisation to be more forthrightly antagonistic to the US, but Brazil, along with India and South Africa, has been resolutely opposed to turning it into an anti-American or anti-Western bloc. 'Brazil knows that China is indispensable, and the US is irreplaceable,' Hussein Kalout, a Brazilian political scientist who previously served as the country's special secretary for strategic affairs, told me. 'Brazil will never make a binary choice. That is not an option.' Indeed, Brazil has much to lose in alienating the US, and its growing ties with China are as much a symptom of American vinegar as Chinese honey. It does a huge amount of business with the US, running a trade surplus in America's favour of about US$7 billion last year. America is Brazil's largest source of foreign direct investment, rising steadily over the past decade in everything from green energy to manufacturing. Lula and Trump may be ideological opposites, but if they were ever to meet, they would have plenty of pragmatic reasons to get along. Instead, Trump has chosen antagonism. Part of his calculation, clearly, is political. But if Trump thought he was helping Bolsonaro's right-wing supporters win back power by undermining Lula, his letter appears to have had the opposite effect. Lula, once one of the world's most popular and celebrated leaders, won a very narrow victory in 2023. His popularity has sagged as he struggles to deliver on his election promise to bring down prices and improve the economy. Thanks to Trump's attacks, Brazilians are rallying around their president. However, the spat shows something deeper and more important. For many rising powers, China's supposedly revisionist designs on reshaping the globe pale in comparison to Trump's shocking use of tariffs, sanctions, and military firepower. 'From a Brazilian perspective, the country firmly seeking to change the underlying dynamics of the global order is the US,' Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian German political scientist who has written extensively about Brics, told me. America, not China, is the wrecker. This is a shock to the world, and a terrible shame for America. Trump is missing an opportunity that his two predecessors — Barack Obama and Joe Biden — let slip through their fingers: to use America's waning dominance to shape a new, more egalitarian multipolar order that preserves American influence and power while making room for others to rise. This would be no easy task, requiring painful choices about core American values and commitments. It would also demand humility, a quality few American presidents have shown, in no small part because American voters tend not to seek or reward it. Americans have now elected a president who seems to have none at all and whose words and deeds brim with an arrogance that even the crudest caricature of the ugly American would not conjure. Even as Trump pledged to avoid foreign wars and entanglements, his vision of peace seems predicated on a form of 'America first' dominance that invites the chaos he promises to avoid. This stance makes violent confrontation with China, the only real rival to American primacy, seem almost inevitable — and the return of the grim contestation that characterised the Cold War more likely, whether China desires it or not. What is certain is that many countries — rich and poor, declining and rising — definitely do not want this. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Lydia Polgreen ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Exclusive: Brazil's president hits back at Trump's threat of 50% tariffs: He ‘was elected not to be emperor of the world'
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva tells CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview it was 'a surprise' to see President Donald Trump's letter posted to Truth Social, threatening Brazil with a crippling tariff of 50% starting August 1st. Lula says that he initially thought the letter was 'fake news.'
