November 12, 2015•Update: November 12, 2015
PARIS
The international climate change conference (COP21) in Paris should lead to a legally binding agreement, French President Francois Hollande said Thursday, in an apparent retort to U.S. State Secretary John Kerry.
Kerry told the Financial Times on Wednesday that the agreement of the Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 UN Paris climate summit was "definitively not going to be a treaty" and would not set “legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto".
The Kyoto protocol, signed in 1997, imposed on all signatory countries an obligation to cut their carbon dioxide emissions by at least 5 percent in the period 2008-2012 versus 1990. Washington refused to sign the treaty.
"If the agreement is not legally binding, there will be no agreement because it will mean that it is not possible to check or control the commitments made by countries," the French president told reporters on the sidelines of a summit on migration in Valletta, Malta.
The "review clause", the terms of which are under negotiation, will allow the contributions submitted by each country to be "regularly reviewed to arrive at this path: no more than 2C of global warming," insisted Hollande.
The French president said he understood the difficulties the U.S. executive authorities are facing, given the reluctance of the Congress's Republican majority, but countries must make concessions.
"If there is an agreement, it should be given a binding nature in the sense that the commitments that would been made must be kept and respected," he added.
France’s top diplomat Laurent Fabius said any deal reached in Paris next month will be legally binding and have a concrete impact, and the Paris talks were not just "hot air" unlike previous negotiations.
"Jurists will discuss the legal nature of an accord on whether it should be termed as a treaty or an international agreement," Fabius told reporters in Malta.
"But the fact that a certain number of dispositions should have a practical effect and be legally binding is obvious so let's not confuse things, which is perhaps what Mr. Kerry has done," Fabius said.
"This is not a political discussion. This is a real accord with facts," he added.
Fabius is to preside over the summit that will see more than 150 world leaders gather to hammer out a deal to tackle global warming. The UN is seeking to limit global warming to 2C (3.6F) above pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
An agreement prepared by diplomats is due to be signed at the end of the Conference of Parties (COP), which will include U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
