{"id":200,"date":"2025-11-05T01:22:02","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T01:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/?p=200"},"modified":"2025-11-05T01:22:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T01:22:03","slug":"minamata-convention-day-2-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/2025\/11\/05\/minamata-convention-day-2-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Minamata Convention Day 2 – Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Kiera Bonner <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early Start<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On our second day attending the Minamata Convention, we got started bright and early before the plenary session working with the Chemical & Waste Youth Platform run Mercury Youth Task Force to begin finalizing the draft of our Global Youth Declaration on Mercury. Led by advocate Shannon Lisa, we, along with many other members of the group, collaborated to complete the introduction for the declaration. Everyone had a lot of great additions to make in the statement, and we had many discussions on different variables of mercury\u2019s effect on human health all over the world within several distinct groups. Once the introduction was completed, it was time to work on the intervention member Diana Tapie was to announce that afternoon at the plenary session. The intervention was speaking for the mistreatment and violation of rights of millions of women, children, and Indigenous people as a whole, to call for acknowledgement of the enabling illegal gold mining processes\u2014a main cause for these problems they face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other Happenings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While we were busy concluding our submission for youth voices to be heard, the halls of COP 6 were nothing short of tense. In one room, the Bureau was working together to prepare for the long day ahead and advise President Osvaldo \u00c1lvarez on any issues that may arise along with those which had already made themselves known. Following the Bureau meeting was the bustling of 6 different regional groups\u2014 JUSCANNZ, African Regional, Asian and Pacific Group, Eastern European Group, GRULAC Region, and the European Union\u2014breaking off to discuss the issues at hand of the day and possibly come to a general agreement or mutual understanding of interventions to be made at the plenary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As every day in the convention goes, at 10:00 AM all groups and delegates gather for the morning session of the plenary meeting. Since the first contact group meeting occurred last night, the session began with a recap of the events that took place and the point which the meeting had concluded. At this time, the issue of mercury-added products was the main point of discussion in the Contact Group on technical matters. A phase-out date for imports and exports had yet to be agreed upon, and there was a conclusion to keep both the 2030 and 2034 deadline until a consensus could be reached. Proceeding this discussion was the decision to continue the conversation after the afternoon session at 6:00 PM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morning Plenary <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once reviews of the previous day had\u00a0concluded,\u00a0the topics proposed and requested by specific parties were brought up. In particular, the\u00a0requests for extensions and exemptions by Bangladesh and Thailand, and the options\u00a0for\u00a0future actions\u00a0regarding\u00a0trade in mercury compounds proposed by Canada, Australia, Norway, and Japan.\u00a0As\u00a0each\u00a0subject had significant effects on everyone involved in the convention–\u00a0and most people on the planet–\u00a0both sparked long, charged interventions\u00a0from all speaking parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bangladesh and Thailand, along with the complete support of India, had requested exemptions for at least 6 mercury-added products, which were supposed to be\u00a0a part of the phase-out. The point was made that alternatives were not accessible\u00a0enough,\u00a0and they had not had enough time to do the proper research to\u00a0deem\u00a0anything as an absolute reason to\u00a0eradicate the products in question. There were\u00a0several\u00a0groups who disagreed with their reasonings,\u00a0believing the amount of global research done had been enough to prove\u00a0proper alternatives, including Sierra Leone who spoke on behalf of the entire African Region and\u00a0IPEN. As a result of their disagreements,\u00a0the president (who had previously expressed his wish to keep the contact groups at a minimum)\u00a0announced\u00a0there to be a \u201cFriends of Presidents\u201d Group to draft a proper way to achieve the desired exemptions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The proposed future actions were based around the fact that there weren\u2019t enough regulations on mercury compounds as there were with elemental mercury. To combat this, a CRP was written to propose the establishment of an online expert group between COP 6 and COP 7 to continue working towards the identification of additional mercury compounds. A majority of participants declared their support for these ideas and the CRP or at least the aspirations of the CRP. However, there was some issues coming from India since they wanted more concise guidelines and the timelines were not favorable to their current abilities. As a result, they insisted on a Contact group which they unfortunately did not end up getting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The morning session did not follow the set schedule for the day, and there were several objectives behind once the final item was addressed before lunch. There have been many moments this convention so far which President Osvaldo \u00c1lvarez has expressed his exasperation on parties taking more time than they are welcome to and I feel like that might have been the funniest part of the morning!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kiera Bonner Early Start On our second day attending the Minamata Convention, we got started bright and early before the plenary session working with the Chemical & Waste Youth Platform run Mercury Youth Task Force to begin finalizing the draft of our Global Youth Declaration on Mercury. Led by advocate Shannon Lisa, we, along…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211,"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stodorov.expressions.syr.edu\/cop6-mercury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}