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Russia spells out ratification demands on Kyoto Protocol's 6th birthday
MILAN (AFP) Dec 11, 2003
The Kyoto Protocol on Thursday marked its sixth anniversary as Russia spelled out its demands for ratifying it, a move that would transform the beleaguered pact on global warming into an international treaty.

Russia called for further talks on some detailed technical and legal aspects of the Protocol and warned that the outcome would determine whether it pushed ahead with ratification by the Russian parliament.

"It's vital, we think, to continue negotiations," said Russian delegation chief Alexander Bedritsky, speaking at a conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate change (UNFCCC), which is Kyoto's parent treaty.

German and EU leaders, who have championed Kyoto's cause, said they were familiar with Russia's demands and believed the controversy could be defused without having to reopen a deal that was laboriously concluded in 2001.

And they remained sanguine Moscow would ratify.

"The president of Russia [Vladimir Putin] delivered a message to the World Summit on Sustainable Development last year that they will ratify," German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin told AFP.

"(...) I am very confident that if they assess [the advantages of Kyoto membership], they will come to the result that the advantages for Russia of ratification will be much higher than by not ratifying."

US abandonment of Kyoto in 2001 means that, under the pact's ratification arithmetic, approval by Russia is now essential for it to take effect.

But in recent months, Moscow has been sending mixed signals about when or even if it will ratify as promised, hinting it hopes to wring further concessions from the EU.

Bedritsky said Russia objected to clauses in a Protocol mechanism called Joint Implementation.

This is the term for investment projects in clean technology, made by industrialised countries in other industrialised countries, that help signatories reach Kyoto's target of cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, the pollution blamed for global warming.

Russia's industries opposed "attempts" to "attach legal sanctions and fines in the business contracts" under Joint Implementation, Bedritsky said.

"This has considerably altered the circumstances associated with our participation in the Kyoto Protocol as things stand today. It's vital, we think, to continue negotiations to try to find solutions that are more acceptable to countries that have accepted to cut their GHG [greenhouse-gas] emissions."

He warned: "We wish to resolve a solution that is just and it is on the basis of that principle that the Kyoto process in Russia will be assessed and [also] the assessment of the prospects for ratification."

Kyoto's "framework" of goals and ways of reaching them was concluded on December 11, 1997.

But it took four years of bitter haggling to agree on its notoriously complex rulebook, climaxing in a deal in Bonn and then Marrakech, Morocco in

Still to be hammered out are technical details that are relatively minor compared with the stormy political issues of the past, but which can still carry financial and legal consequences.

European Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom said Russia's concerns on Joint Implementation's small print had already been discussed in a number of EU-Russian meetings in Brussels, and these talks would continue.

"We will absolutely not reopen the Kyoto Protocol or what was agreed in Bonn or Marrakesh. That will not happen," she told AFP.

US President George W. Bush walked out of the Protocol in 2001, depriving the deal of the world's biggest carbon polluter.

Ministers from Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Venezuela on Thursday pledged their countries would soon join 120 other nations that have ratified Kyoto.

Venezuela's promise carries symbolic weight, for it will be the first ratifier from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose members are hostile to Kyoto because of the impact greater energy efficiency will have on their revenues.

The Protocol requires industrialised signatories to cut output of six "greenhouse" gases by 2008-2012 compared with their 1990 levels.

It offers three categories of market mechanisms and incentives, including Joint Implementation, to help them meet these goals.

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