Remember that each country has a different perspective and different priorities.  Your approach would be more effective if you consider the positions of the other countries and what compromises they might be willing to make.

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This scenario is an introduction to the issues you will be discussing in the ICONS simulation. It also gives a very brief overview of some of the interests and policies of other nations in the program. The scenario and country profiles are not meant to be the principal resource for the development of your policies or the conduct of your negotiations. They provide a starting point. You must now research your own country's history, foreign policy, and relations with the other countries involved in this simulation. Your challenge will be to come up with a better agreement than the experts and real world negotiators have found thus far.

Please note that after the program begins, real world developments will not affect the simulation.

The increasingly interdependent world is characterized by fewer trade and border restrictions. Global interdependence coupled with the advent of truly global financial and telecommunications systems have created a new brand of criminals – international criminals who extend their operations beyond national borders. Drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and terrorism are seen as legitimate threats to national security, while the ability of international crime groups to transfer money between countries allows them to continue to elude the grip of traditional crime prevention entities. Their operations are similar to that of multinational corporations, with global reach and infrastructure.

Terrorism
Terrorism continues to plague the international community. Even though terrorism affects most countries, there has been little cooperation at the international level aimed at combating this phenomenon. Indeed, there are only nine major multilateral conventions that states have proposed for combating terrorism. The lack of consensus over how to handle terrorist threats worldwide was seen in August 1998 when U.S. strikes against suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan were condemned by many countries, including a pointed comment by then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, calling the cruise missile attacks "deplorable". The following are examples of other terrorist groups and situations that illustrate the universal/international nature of the problem:

• In Europe, the breakdown of the Anglo-Irish peace process resulted in a new wave of Irish Republican Army violence against targets in the United Kingdom.
• Islamic fundamentalist terrorism has spread to France from Algeria and other countries of North Africa and continues to be a reality in the Middle East.
• Islamic fundamentalists in many Middle Eastern countries often rely on terrorism as a means of making demands both at home and abroad.
• The Basque terrorist group ETA continues to commit terrorist acts in Spain.
• Germany's Turkish minority continues to be the subject of terrorist violence.
• Kurdish minorities continue to clash with Turkish nationals, demanding better representation.
• South and Central American countries continue to be riddled with leftist insurgencies and terrorist attacks.
• Terrorist attacks on the USS Cole off of the coast of Yemen, believed to be suicide missions prompted by Usama bin Laden, an international rogue figure.

In addition to these terrorist situations, several new and potential forms of terrorism are emerging. The sarin gas attack in a Japanese subway in 1995 highlighted the ease with which chemical and biological agents can be delivered against a population. And a recent U.S. military publication noted the vulnerability of the world's communication network and infrastructure to a "cyberattack" over the Internet. Chemical, biological and information warfare, combined with an apparent "internationalization" of terrorist groups, has thus raised the stakes in the international fight against terrorism.

Unlike past decades when most terrorism was conducted by groups who sought to achieve some concrete political aim (the African National Congress, Basque separatist ETA, Irish Republican Army, and Palestinian Liberation Organization, among others), fewer terrorist acts seem to have clear purposes today. It appears that the "statement" or the act itself is the most important reason for carrying out an attack. How else can the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect’s 1995 nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway be explained? Terrorism has also become more global in scope, with attacks occurring beyond previously defined "dangerous" areas, for example, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community building in Buenos Aires, and the more recent embassy bombings in Africa.

Counter-terrorism databases list 3,000 suspected terrorist groups. The more successful of these have plenty of money to support training, the acquisition of weaponry (along with explosives and chemical and biological agents), and the planning and implementation of large-scale attacks. (This is an especially worrisome point, given the low cost of carrying out the bombing of the U.S. federal building in Oklahoma City.) Aum Shinrikyo had estimated assets of about $1 billion, and had taken advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union and economic problems in Russia to equip itself with sophisticated weaponry. Much of the weaponry available on the international black market, including tons of Semtex, the Czech-manufactured plastic explosive, and tens of thousands of Kalishnikov rifles, comes from the arsenals of the former Warsaw Pact nations. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi expatriate whose group is alleged to have orchestrated the August 1998 attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, has a personal fortune estimated to be as high as $300 million.

As terrorism has become more international in scope, dealing with it has required more international cooperation, as may be seen in the investigations and trials of the suspects alleged to be responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103, the embassies in Africa, and the USS Cole. In addition, cooperation is obviously necessary in preventing these attacks in the first place.

With the evolution of technology, a new type of terrorism has emerged: Cyber-terrorism. Recently, official web sites of the Japanese government were violated by computer hackers. The hackers placed a link to a pornographic site on the Science and Technology Agency homepage, posted messages attacking Japan over the 1937 Nanking massacre, and important data, including the population census, was erased. Another act of cyber-terrorism is e-bombs. These are viruses in the form of email messages that can destroy entire hard drives and cause networks to fail. Governments and corporations increasingly face technological security issues resulting from cyber-terrorism as they come to rely more on the Internet for conducting business ranging from posting government information to transferring monetary funds.

International banking must figure prominently into discussions of international crime because of the connection of money laundering to contraband trafficking, illegal arms sales, and terrorist financing, as well as business fraud, which is increasingly capable of crossing international borders. There have been international efforts to get countries to develop and enforce anti-money laundering statutes. These efforts include provisions under the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances and the establishment of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) by the G­7 Economic Summit in Paris in 1989.

There are, however, complications in these efforts: 1) the increased penetration of worldwide financial systems by organized crime groups; 2) increased money laundering where anti­money laundering laws are rare; 3) differences in levels of compliance with international anti­money laundering standards, specifically in Asia and Latin America as compared with the U.S., Canada and Western Europe; and 4) the interest in achieving the fastest possible system for international transfers of payments, which benefits both banking/business and criminal money laundering groups.

The International Crime Conference will focus on international efforts to control international terrorism, as well as actions that can be taken to prevent the money laundering that allows these groups to flourish.

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Environmental issues are inherently international as natural resources are "global commons" that are shared among all members of the world community. Air pollution caused by one nation affects other nations, as does acid rain and deforestation. Countries do, however, also claim that international attempts to protect the environment infringe on sovereignty. A general lack of world consensus and leadership in this arena gives non-profit groups, such as Greenpeace, greater influence than they might have if nation-states were taking a stronger lead toward solving these problems.

Biodiversity
Biodiversity is one area of international concern. Ensuring the protection of the huge variety of plant and animal species, organisms, and habitats is a difficult task in the wake of the need for development in many less developed countries (LDCs). A number of proposals have been put forth and a few agreements signed as the international community has begun to recognize the need to promote conservation.

One of the earliest attempts to protect endangered species was the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international treaty drawn up in 1973. The objective of the treaty is to protect wildlife against over-exploitation and to prevent international trade from threatening species with extinction.

In 1992, the international community began a negotiation process on a number of pressing international environmental concerns, among them global warming and biodiversity. The UN Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Though the conference was billed as a landmark of environmental progress, it achieved far less than originally hoped. Nevertheless, important issues facing the environment were discussed, and important agreements were reached. These agreements were:

The Rio Declaration: A statement of purpose on the principles of sustainable development, from eradicating poverty to making polluters pay for environmental damage.

Agenda 21: An 800-page action plan, with a $125 billion price tag for implementation including the Green Fund

Climate change: A treaty to head off global warming, with specific target dates and allowable levels of carbon emissions.

Biodiversity: An agreement to head off extinction of many of the world's species of plants and animals.

In April 1995, 120 countries agreed to hold talks on reducing emissions, which contribute to global warming. This agreement to hold talks is referred to as the Berlin Mandate. Subsequent to this agreement and the talks that followed, the 1992 Rio Declaration was signed. The signatories of the Rio Declaration agreed to reduce emissions by the year 2000. This component of the Rio Declaration was followed in December 1997 by the Kyoto Accords, signed in Kyoto, Japan.

In December 1997, 38 industrialized countries agreed to adopt binding targets for reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to be responsible for global warming by signing the Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Control.

President Clinton was not able to bring the treaty before the U.S. Senate for ratification before he left office. The president said that he would not commit the United States to the treaty until the developing nations vowed to maintain their own commitment under Kyoto. But even if the developed world was immediately to initiate measures to meet their Kyoto commitments, many think it impossible to reduce CO₂ emissions by the required 50%. Some critics of Clinton environmental policy, though, believe that his administration also thought that the emission levels are unrealistic and that by gaining Senate approval, it would force the U.S. to comply with an impossible set of regulations. Thus, it is unclear whether the Kyoto Accords will actually be implemented in the near future.

Another attempt to preserve diversity in the environment is through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). It has as its objectives "the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources." The treaty came into force in late 1993, and the signatory parties have met regularly since to work out implementation issues. Far less progress has been made in this area than in dealing with climate change, which may be a result of the difficulty in assessing the impact of biodiversity on humankind.

The Clinton administration did sign, but the U.S. Senate has not yet ratified it; therefore, the U.S. is not a full partner in the negotiations. There has been some concern about the limits that the treaty could place on the U.S. biotechnology industry. Among the issues not yet fully dealt with in the treaty process have been questions about compensating the developing nations for biological materials with medical and commercial applications while protecting the investments and interests of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

The first ecosystem to be addressed within the CBD framework is marine and coastal areas. At a meeting in Jakarta in March 1997, experts met to begin the process of developing a plan for preserving the biodiversity of these areas. The economic importance of ocean resources has led to marine biodiversity coming under attack from a number of sectors: construction, mining, shipping, agriculture, tourism, and fishing. The growth of commercial fishing provides one of the most obvious examples of the problem. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 70 percent of the world's commercially important fish stocks are fully or over-exploited.

The 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) Millennium Round was held in Seattle, bringing much protest from environmental and animal welfare advocates. These protestors tended to be from the EDC countries. One of the main issues drawing supporters came from vehement opposition to the WTO ruling regarding sea turtles. The WTO overturned a US policy that banned importing shrimp from fishing boats that did not protect sea turtles while shrimping. Other environmental supporters protested policies by MNCs that deplete the rainforests and other irrecoverable territories. Similarly, issues of protecting the world from pollution and global warming were also raised.

Included in preserving biodiversity is preserving the habitats of indigenous people. As many indigenous people themselves are being threatened, preservation is necessarily a two-fold process of protecting the people and their environs. Difficulties arise, however, in a world where countries depend on many of the same resources for hard cash that indigenous people rely upon for survival.

The upcoming Global Environment Conferences follow up on the CITES treaty, the Rio and Kyoto conferences, and the CBD framework in an attempt to develop mutually acceptable and effective approaches to these environmental issues.

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The international economic system has become increasingly intertwined and interconnected, particularly due to phenomenal advances in communications, medicine, and technology over the last few decades. With this development, inventors, artists, scientists, and more importantly, the companies they work for, want to secure claims on their inventions, songs, and pharmaceuticals. In many ways, these claims only serve to make the multinational corporations (MNCs) richer, while increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. Instead of having the cutting-edge machinery to farm thousands of acres of land, a large percentage of the world’s farmers still rely on animals and their own human power. Instead of learning by sitting in hi-tech classrooms, some children must forego school to work in order to help their families survive.

Intellectual Property Rights
Intellectual property rights (IPR) are the copyrights, patents, and trademarks that protect the artistic, literary, scientific, and original work of inventors, artists, scientists, and the companies that promote their works, processes, or procedures. Several international treaties have been established to protect IPR.

· The Berne Convention: protects original literary, artistic, and scientific works

· The Budapest Treaty: protects scientific processes and procedures

· The Geneva Convention: protects audio recordings

· The Madrid Convention: serves to simplify trademark registration procedures in foreign countries

· The Paris Convention: protest inventions

· The Universal Copyright Convention: protects original works in a way similar to the Berne Convention, but grants leeway to LDCs for academic purposes

The significance of intellectual property rights is that they guarantee that the person or company that originated the work will be recognized for their contribution as well as, in many cases, compensated financially for their work. Those who produce original works argue that if an original work was not protected, then that person or company could control the entire use of the product and would keep it secret form others. Thus, protecting the work promotes a transfer of knowledge and technology. Similarly, protecting products also fosters innovation that benefits everyone. From a capitalist perspective, when someone produces a work and is compensated for it, then others are encouraged to improve upon that product to make it more efficient and accessible to greater numbers of people. Thus, protecting products encourages competition and innovation. For consumers, however, the argument is put forth that knowledge should be the heritage of humankind and should be shared with those who need it most, in particular, less developed countries.

However, people hold different views about protecting intellectual property rights. Indeed the primary split occurs between the EDCs and the LDCs. The EDCs think that protecting a producer’s work is essential to fostering further work and is a means to ensure that capital is not lost to piracy and uncompensated reproductions of that work. This point is confirmed by the several treaties proposed and ratified by the EDCs that have become international law.

The LDCs, on the other hand, feel that as countries trying to further their own development, adhering to these treaties and enforcing international law---established by EDCs---regarding intellectual property rights is burdensome and hinders their development potential. With the huge disparities in development between the EDCs and the LDCs, the LDCs argue that the capital they gain from reproducing works without compensation to the original producer is essential to their growth, while it iws an insignificant percentage of lost capital to the EDCs. Additionally, as struggling economies, employing additional government workers to implement and enforce international IPR laws is costly. That money could instead be used to further development so that, once stable, they could more readily adopt and enforce these laws.

LDCs also take issue with another aspect of IPR. They point to the refusal of the United States to sign the Paris Convention in 1883. At that time, the United States claimed that it could not adopt this policy because it would hinder its development. Countries like the United States should recognize the position LDCs are in, should realize that the EDCs did not develop overnight, and that similar indiscretions occurred during their own development. In the name of progress, human rights, the environment, and even international law were violated. Now, however, the EDCs expect LDC development, but expect them to play by different rules.

Some policy makers argue that it is not in the interest in EDCs to aid or to grant concessions to LDCs.  They argue that LDCs must make the progress on their own, otherwise the EDCs are just adding to the population growth, increasing health problems, and environmental degradation while neglecting their own growth and development.  As evidence in support of this point, most EDCs contribute less than 1% of their entire GDP toward foreign aid, at least indirectly supporting this notion.

Some policy makers argue that the growth and development of LDCs is in the interest of the EDCs.  On one hand, there is a purely self-interested reason for EDCs to promote sustainable development in LDCs---because the EDCs will reap the benefits of having access to more markets where they can sell their goods and uphold IPR laws.  On the other hand, there is also a humanitarian argument for LDC development in that with development, fewer people will suffer from the atrocities of poverty, as more people can be educated, receive generic versions of pharmaceuticals, or advance their technology.  

In many cases, respecting and upholding IPR is a contingent for LDCs to have open trade relations with the EDCs. For instance, the National Economic Advisor to the US president is responsible for determining which countries sufficiently enforce IPR. In turn, if the US trades with these countries, but they continually violate IPR, the United States will threaten to cut off trade relations unless measures are taken to uphold IPR, as was the case with South Korea in the mid-1990s.

The International Economic Conferences further explore the implications of the several conventions that dictate policy on intellectual property rights and how they affect international economics through EDC and LDC relations.

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In this day and age when capitalism is the dominant economic determinant, having "beaten out" the socialist state-run economic system, it should come as little surprise that even bodily organs and tissue have become a world commodity. In many countries, children have become commodities for their organs and tissue. In several countries, poor people resort to selling their organs. And in many places, unsuspecting people are victimized for their organs. Indeed the effects of organ trafficking are only detrimental to health and abusive of human rights throughout the world.

Organ Trafficking
The demand for organs for transplants exists worldwide, although a majority of the organ transplants that take place occur in EDCs. There is a dire need---and demand for--- kidneys and other organs, though the supply is far short of the need. However, the demand for these organs far exceeds the supply, creating an underground international market to help meet these demands.

As of yet, there are no international conventions or treaties that specifically seek to eliminate and ban organ trafficking or the transport of persons for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Indeed, protecting individuals from cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment is the intent of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Nonetheless, few measures have been taken by the international community to address the many crimes associated with organ trafficking.

In the United States, the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) made it illegal "for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce." Nonetheless, this has not stopped networks from bringing in harvested organs from abroad. In the late 1990s, two Chinese nationals were arrested in New York for allegedly attempting to sell body organs from executed Chinese prisoners for transplant operations. This incidence occurred at about the same time that an offer appeared on E-Bay, an Internet auction site, for the sale of a kidney. Nor has it stopped children from illegally being brought into the country to be used for any number of organ, tissue, or medical experimental purposes. Children are sold and transported from any number of LDCs to the United States and other EDCs where their organs are harvested for transplants.

In Denmark, the authorities initiated investigations upon hearing allegations of organ trafficking. And in Israel, there have been reports of Israelis traveling to neighboring countries (especially Egypt) to buy kidneys for transplant from poor immigrant workers. Among the most recent efforts to address issues of organ trafficking took place in 1999. The Council of Europe, a body of the EU, put forth a Protocol to the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, on transplantation of organs and tissues of human origin, in order to bring attention to the issue of organ trafficking and robbery that affects both Europeans and those donors from abroad.

In many countries, children have become commodities for their organs and tissue. For instance, in the mid-1990s, reporters in Brazil investigated adoptions of Brazilian children by European couples. They suspected that in many cases it was possible that children were not being adopted into families, but rather to harvest their organs and tissues. Their reports were substantiated by the fact that the number of donors legally registered who donate organs for transplant in Europe is far fewer than the actual number of transplants conducted. In response to this and many similar atrocities, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights has raised this issue with the General Assembly under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Under this convention, it would be illegal to sell children for the purpose to harvest their organs. As of January 2001, 69 countries signed on to the convention.

The people of developing countries tend to be the victims of organ trafficking, where children become objects of trade for their organs and tissue and the poor have to resort to selling their organs to continue to live. Not only does organ trafficking challenge ethical medical standards, it has serious repercussions regarding communicable diseases that can be spread through transplanting organs or tissue from unknown donors. In many cases illegally obtained organs have been harvested from poor people in developing countries who need to sell their organs in order to feed their families and themselves.

In India, kidney donation is a lucrative enterprise. In 1999, police arrested 10 people and shut down a private hospital in connection with a kidney donation racket. Poor people are particularly susceptible to the lures of such rackets because they are offered money or jobs in return for donating their organs. Even though in 1994 legislation was put into place in India banning such practices, underground operations continue. Reports have been made of rich men from the Gulf region marrying Indian women literally for their organs, and then divorcing them after the transplants had been done, referred to as "kidney marriage."

Indeed the donors might only be harming themselves if the organ removal is not done under sanitary conditions, in many cases not living long enough to receive their payments. Similarly, the recipient might be unknowingly inviting disease into him/herself as the health conditions in many of these countries are very poor and unsanitary, in turn, increasing the possibility that a donor may be carrying an unsuspected or unknown disease of some sort. Likewise, diseases that are in recession may not even appear until months or years later. It is also quite possible that the donor’s family medical history goes unreported to the recipient, making it quite possible that the organ may only introduce disease into the recipient. Furthermore, in most cases the ethical ramifications of obtaining organs from unsuspecting victims who were operated on under the pretense of needing an appendectomy or gall bladder operation are not even considered.

One particular country at the center of the organ trafficking controversy is China, where the organ procurement business is a government-run racket. Executed prisoners’ organs are removed for transplants both at home and abroad. Often times, those on death row have undergone extensive medical tests so that doctors can pre-match the prisoners with those future recipients of their organs. Increasingly, executions are even expedited in order to meet the needs of the paying recipients.

The World Health delegates are charged with the responsibility of addressing the plethora of issues involving organ trafficking.