Context can be important, and so writing today still smarting from my beloved Manchester United’s unceremonious dumping out of the Champions League by FC Basel, what else could I write about other than Basel? Not the football team of course (I have read enough about them, thank you) but the Basel Convention and more topically the recent developments at the tenth Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention held in Colombia.

It may have passed many by, obsessed as we are by weekly bin collections and the state of the Eurozone, the two most important issues facing the country at the moment (in the eyes of some newspapers). However, it is worth a fresh look, as in October all 178 countries that are Parties to the Basel Convention supported the early entry into national laws of the Basel Ban Amendment prohibiting all exports of hazardous wastes, including electronic wastes and old obsolete ships from developed to developing countries. 

Although this amendment has been in existence for 16 years, it will only come into force when 68 of the original 90 countries that ratified Basel in 1995 have ratified this proposal. So far 51 have done so, and it is expected that the balance needed will do this in the next couple of years.

Probably the biggest absentee from the table on Basel remains the United States, which has still not ratified the convention at all. Previous laggards (including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan) have now signed up, and it is expected that there will be more diplomatic pressure upon the US and other absentees to ratify, especially as they will (in theory) find it hard to avoid the implications of the amendment.