Guardian: “Developing countries have reacted angrily to revelations that the United States spied on other governments at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.”
“Documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored communication between key countries before and during the conference to give their negotiators advance information about other positions at the high-profile meeting where world leaders including Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel failed to agree to a strong deal on climate change.
Jairam Ramesh, the then Indian environment minister and a key player in the talks that involved 192 countries and 110 heads of state, said: “Why the hell did they do this and at the end of this, what did they get out of Copenhagen? They got some outcome but certainly not the outcome they wanted. It was completely silly of them.
….The document shows the NSA had provided advance details of the Danish plan to “rescue” the talks should they founder, and also had learned of China’s efforts to coordinate its position with India before the conference.
The talks – which ended in disarray after the US, working with a small group of 25 countries, tried to ram through an agreement that other developing countries mostly rejected – were marked by subterfuge, passion and chaos.
Members of the Danish negotiating team told the Danish newspaper Information that both the US and Chinese delegations were “peculiarly well-informed” about closed-door discussions. “They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document,” one source told Information.
British negotiators at the summit declined to say whether their negotiating positions had been informed by US intelligence. “It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters,” said a spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the UK government department that led the negotiations in Copenhagen.
Ed Miliband, who as energy secretary led the political negotiations for Britain, declined to comment. However, at the time, he was furious that the Danish text which the US had received advance information about,had been leaked to the Guardian.
But one key negotiator for the G77 group of 132 developing countries, who asked not to be named, said at the time that he strongly believed that the US was eavesdropping on his meetings and would only talk in a secure back room that he thought was not bugged. “I was well aware that they seemed to know what our position was before we did,” he told the Guardian.”
Future Today
