34th G8 Summit - Overview

Overview

The Group of Seven (G7) was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada starting in 1976. The G8, meeting for the first time in 1997, was formed with the addition of Russia. In addition, the President of the European Commission has been formally included in summits since 1981. The summits were not meant to be linked formally with wider international institutions; and in fact, a mild rebellion against the stiff formality of other international meetings was a part of the genesis of cooperation between France's President Giscard d'Estaing and West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as they conceived the initial summit of the Group of Six (G6) in 1975.

In discussions regarding Africa during the 34th G8 Summit, the G8 leaders set a five-year deadline to commit US$60 billion in funding to help fight disease in Africa and renewed a commitment made three years earlier to double aid for Africa to $25-billion by 2010 and to consider pledging further assistance after 2010. On the topic of global warming, the G8 leaders agreed on the need for the world to cut carbon emissions blamed for global warming by at least 50 percent by 2050. Environmental activists and leaders from the developing countries described the statement as a "toothless gesture". Results of discussions on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which had earlier been leaked by Wikileaks, were not known. The G8 leaders made statements regarding their relations with Zimbabwe, Iran and North Korea. The responses of the G8 leaders to the "Challenge to the G8 Governments" of over 100 NGOs and other organisations and individuals requesting them to "cancel all illegitimate debt", to "end the practice of using loans and debt cancellation to impose conditionalities" and to "facilitate the return of stolen assets kept in the banks in the G8 countries" are not presently known. Regarding the 2007–2008 world food price crisis, the differences between the G8 leaders and the citizens' groups' approaches to solving the crisis appeared unresolved. The G8's communiqué said that it was "imperative" to remove export restrictions, in contrast to requests of the signers of the "Challenge to the G8 Governments".

The G8 summits during the 21st-century have also involved widespread parallel debates and protests by citizens and claimed human rights violations against some of them during massive police/military operations. Over 40 dissidents were arrested before the summit started and nineteen or twenty Koreans critical of the G8 leadership were detained at New Chitose Airport for at least 24 hours. During a "non-violent demonstration where no acts against property or people took place" according to a legal observer, at least four people were arrested, including a Reuters cameraman. At this venue, amongst the reasons cited for demonstrations and protests were that a G8 summit is merely an arbitrary meeting of national leaders and that it is also a nexus which becomes more than the sum of its parts, elevating the participants, the event and the venue as focal points for activist pressure.