The United Nations cannot continue to document colonial injustice in Kanaky New Caledonia without using its mandate to bring colonialism to an end.
The Pacific Regional Non-Government Organisations (PRNGO) Alliance, including Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS), Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), Greenpeace Australia Pacific (GPAP), and over 20 Pacific civil society organisations, questioned the agenda of the “blue growth” forum, arguing that the workshop emphasises sponsoring States, but only includes observer engagement with other Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS).
Drawing from the International Court of Justice’s landmark Advisory Opinion (AO) in July last year, the policy review challenges Melanesian Leaders to revisit their commitments under the Udaune Declaration of 2023, to ensure national policies on ocean protection in relation to deep-sea mining are in place to ground the moratorium stance.
This policy review highlights the urgent need for regional and international commitments made by MSG countries and the wider Pacific region to be backed by strong domestic legal frameworks. It also highlights the urgent need to translate ocean commitments into enforceable national laws, particularly in relation to deep-sea mining (DSM), where concerns over environmental, social, and ecological impacts continue to intensify.
“As regional actors, this MOU formalises our commitment as an Alliance to coordinate and articulate Pacific peoples’ perspectives, ensuring there is recognition and engagement at regional to international policy platforms,” says Tau.
The current impasse is the direct result of a strategy of systematic ‘forcings’ pursued by the French state, in defiance of the country’s fundamental balances. The 2024 uprising must be analysed as the direct consequence of the breakdown of the principle of consensus: the plan to expand the electorate acted as the catalyst for a predictable crisis, transforming an orderly statutory transition into a phase of violent instability.
“The relationship between the French State and New Caledonia remains that of coloniser-colonised. The decolonisation process is unfinished and suffers from distortion, but also from a whole arsenal of colonialist assaults, political, legal, as well as media and military.”
The EPKNC calls on all Churches, all fraternal partners and all political leaders to heed what this moment demands of us: not tension, not domination, not forgetting, but truth, justice and courage.
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