A/HRC/15/32
promoting interdependence and its positive effects, can also have the opposite effects of
disconnection and exclusion, especially for people surviving on the edge of existence.
Accountability and shared responsibilities were recently stressed to be essential to
development:
We must embrace shared responsibilities across national boundaries. For example,
self-interest and short-term thinking have plagued progress on global trade reform.
When Governments provide development assistance, but at the same time continue
massive agricultural subsidies to their own farmers, they aren’t promoting
sustainable development for all. They are undermining development prospects and
damaging the livelihoods of some of our most vulnerable sisters and brothers.9
This underlines the importance of policy coherence across sectors and institutions, and in
international, regional and national policies of States.
2.
South-South cooperation
51.
Solidarity, friendship and cooperation, sovereignty and territorial integrity were the
core principles of the Bandung Conference of 1955 between leaders of Asian and African
countries, reinvigorated in 2005 in the Declaration on the New Asian-African Strategic
Partnership and the Joint Ministerial Statement. Mutual aid among countries of the South
can be at the bilateral, regional and global levels. Countries cooperate in the areas of reform
of global governance institutions, the Millennium Development Goals, poverty, food
security, energy security, climate change and sustainable development, which all hope to
achieve through the advantages of globalization.
52.
The Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2006 and the IndiaAfrica Forum Summit in 2008, and the greater involvement of Latin American countries in
Africa are increasing the continent’s cooperation at the bilateral level, which could evolve
into regional, and eventually global, issues of common concern. Trade and investment
arrangements with newly emerging economies are seeing a large increase in economic
activity in Africa, and hold much promise for the future, provided they are implemented in
a context of fairness and equity, information-sharing, experience, awareness and equal
partnerships for all.10 Technical cooperation among developing countries, or South-South
cooperation, is guided by the goal of contributing to strengthening relations; for instance,
Brazil follows a policy of “solidarity diplomacy” whereby it makes its own experience and
knowledge available to other developing countries to promote economic and social progress
without imposing conditions, and areas of cooperation are defined by recipient countries.
3.
Major global summits and ministerial meetings in the economic, social and climate
fields
53.
Support for the principle of international solidarity, and the coordinated approach to
addressing global issues that this principle calls for, was witnessed in a series of major
global meetings spanning the diverse but interrelated thematic areas of development, trade,
aid, the financial and economic crisis, and the environment. The Doha Review Conference
and Declaration of 2008 reaffirmed the global partnership for sustainable development that
had been launched in Monterrey. Solidarity also underpinned the World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, in 2002; the outcome documents of the second
and third High-Level Forums on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 and 2008, namely the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action; the Conference on the
9
10
16
Mary Robinson, Public Symposium on the theme “Responding to global crises: new development
paths”, UNCTAD, Geneva, 11 May 2010.
Kofi Annan, “Inside Africa”, CNN, 5 June 2010.
GE.10-14914
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