UNREPORTED: News on the United Nations System at Work.

"PIC" in Effect

A late 1998 incident, in which toxic chemicals unwittingly imported from Taiwan Province of China brought fear, death and anger to the Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville, will be much easier to prevent in future under a new international convention. Called the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent (PIC), it introduces voluntary limitations to international trade in pesticides and other hazardous chemicals. The 22 pesticides and 5 industrial chemicals that are banned or severely restricted in at least two countries may, under the Convention, no longer be exported unless the receiving country, for reasons of its own, agrees to import them.

An initiative of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the United Nations Environment Programme, PIC will help Governments make informed decisions on whether, or under what circumstances, to import known harmful substances. The arrangement formalizes and gives legal status to an international exchange of information that has been going on for years.

The Convention was adopted in September 1998 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, by 62 Governments after two years of negotiations that have involved more than 150 countries. Four Asian-Pacific countries Indonesia, Mongolia, New Zealand and the Philippines were among the immediate signatories, and most other countries in the region are expected to sign up in 1999. PIC will come into effect three months after 50 sovereign States ratify it.

UN Volunteers in East Timor

The first of some 400 polling officers recruited by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme were fielded in mid-June to help prepare East Timor's "popular consultation", a ballot scheduled for this summer which is to decide on the territory's special autonomy or separation from Indonesia.

The rest of the short-term UNVs, representing some 50 nationalities, are set to arrive in East Timor by the end of June after completing five days of electoral training at an airforce base in Darwin, Australia. Ten UNV physicians and 10 laboratory technicians will accompany the polling officers.

UN volunteers are being sent for a two-month term of service in compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1246 of 11 June, which established the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) to organize and conduct the popular consultation.

Organizing and observing elections has been a key area of work for UN volunteers since the early 1990s. More than...