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POLITICS

Macron urges fresh push to fight climate change and poverty

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East should not distract the world from tackling climate change and poverty.

Macron urges fresh push to fight climate change and poverty
French President Emmanuel Macron writes that fighting poverty and climate change must be the global priorities. Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP

In an op-ed published in the newspaper Le Monde, Macron proposed a new global climate pact and reiterated his calls to reform global financial governance to better involve emerging countries.

The French president is keen to move on with his reform agenda after months of wrangling over controversial immigration legislation, whose passage in parliament sparked a political crisis this month.

He said Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict “must not make us deviate from our priorities”.

“We must accelerate the ecological transition and the fight against poverty at the same time,” Macron said.

“No country will agree to lead its population into a social and economic dead end to protect the planet.”

Macron has made tackling climate change a key plank of his policies.

Nearly 200 nations meeting at the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai agreed earlier this month to a first-ever call for the world to transition away from fossil fuels.

Macron said it was up to developed G7 countries as well as China to lead the way to help wean the world off fossil fuels.

“We must exit coal in 2030, exit oil in 2045 and exit gas in 2050,” he wrote.

He said the financing of renewable energies but also of nuclear energy in emerging countries should be accelerated.

Macron also called for reform of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“Eighty years after its creation, this financial architecture is undersized compared to the size of the world economy and population,” he said.

“It is also largely fragmented, because we have not opened the door to emerging and developing countries in the governance of these institutions.”

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POLITICS

France’s Uyghurs say Xi visit a ‘slap’ from Macron

Uyghurs in France on Friday said President Emmanuel Macron welcoming his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping next week was tantamount to "slapping" them.

France's Uyghurs say Xi visit a 'slap' from Macron

Xi is due to make a state visit to France on Monday and Tuesday.

Dilnur Reyhan, the founder of the European Uyghur Institute and a French national, said she and others were “angry” the Chinese leader was visiting.

“For the Uyghur people — and in particular for French Uyghurs — it’s a slap from our president, Emmanuel Macron,” she said, describing the Chinese leader as “the executioner of the Uyghur people”.

Beijing stands accused of incarcerating more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention facilities across the Xinjiang region.

Campaigners and Uyghurs overseas have said an array of abuses take place inside the facilities, including torture, forced labour, forced sterilisation and political indoctrination.

A UN report last year detailed “credible” evidence of torture, forced medical treatment and sexual or gender-based violence — as well as forced labour — in the region.

But it stopped short of labelling Beijing’s actions a “genocide”, as the United States and some other Western lawmakers have done.

Beijing consistently denies abuses and claims the allegations are part of a deliberate smear campaign to contain its development.

It says it is running vocational training centres in Xinjiang which have helped to combat extremism and enhance development.

Standing beside Reyhan at a press conference in Paris, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who presented herself as having spent three years in a detention camp, said she was “disappointed”.

“I am asking the president to bring up the issue of the camps with China and to firmly demand they be shut down,” she said.

Human Rights Watch on Friday urged Macron during the visit to “lay out consequences for the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity and deepening repression”.

“Respect for human rights has severely deteriorated under Xi Jinping’s rule,” it said.

“His government has committed crimes against humanity… against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, adopted draconian legislation that has erased Hong Kong’s freedoms, and intensified repression of government critics across the country.”

“President Macron should make it clear to Xi Jinping that Beijing’s crimes against humanity come with consequences for China’s relations with France,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch

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