[Officials
from Nepal plan to present the proposal at a meeting of Himalayan nations,
including Pakistan, India and China, which is scheduled to be held in Katmandu,
the capital of Nepal, next month. Nepal hopes to persuade its counterparts to
adopt similar policies, which would require the employment of local guides by
climbers ascending any mountain higher than 8,000 meters, or about 26,250 feet.]
By
Gardiner Harris
 |
Struggling to cope with a crush of
climbers and garbage on Mount Everest, Nepal
is considering a proposal that would require every foreign climber to hire a local guide. Credit Namgyal Sherpa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
NEW DELHI — Struggling to cope with a crush of climbers and garbage on Mount Everest, Nepal is also considering a proposal that would require every foreign climber to hire a local guide to ascend the country’s highest peaks.
The intention is to increase local employment in an industry
that is increasingly reliant on foreign guides, officials said on Thursday. The
policy could also help avoid the kind of on-mountain disputes that led to a confrontation last year when three professional
climbers from abroad told a group of Sherpas that they wanted to climb on their
own.
Officials from Nepal plan to present the proposal at a meeting
of Himalayan nations, including Pakistan, India and China, which is scheduled
to be held in Katmandu, the capital of Nepal, next month. Nepal hopes to
persuade its counterparts to adopt similar policies, which would require the
employment of local guides by climbers ascending any mountain higher than 8,000
meters, or about 26,250 feet.
“We want to ensure the safety of climbers and generate job
opportunities for local guides to boost our economy,” said Madhu Sudan
Burlakoti, a joint secretary at Nepal’s tourism ministry.
If adopted, the policy would go into effect for the 2015
climbing season, Mr. Burlakoti said.
Nepal’s government announced on March 3 that it would require
every climber returning from the summit of Mount Everest to bring back at least 18 pounds of
garbage, the first concerted effort to eliminate the estimated 50
tons of trash that has been left on the mountain over the past six decades. The
waste includes empty oxygen bottles, torn tents and discarded food containers.
The government also announced that it would lower the fees for
foreigners to climb Mount Everest to $10,000 from $25,000.
It is unclear whether the measures will improve the climbing
experience. In recent years, lines of hundreds of climbers have snaked up Mount
Everest, creating a dangerous situation in poor weather. On a single day in 2012, 234 climbers reached the
peak, with some unable to stand on Mount Everest’s highest point because of the
crush of people.
Bhadra Sharma
contributed reporting from Katmandu, Nepal.
[The
focus of the investigation will be the carnage that unfolded in the military
campaign at the end of the war, a time when up to 40,000 civilians are reported
to have died, mainly as a result of heavy military bombardment of areas in
which the military had encouraged them to assemble.]
By
GENEVA — Overriding fierce
objections from Sri Lanka, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted on
Thursday to open an international investigation into possible war crimes by
both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger rebels in the final stages
of a 26-year civil war that ended in 2009.
The
council’s 47 members voted 23 to 12 with 12 abstentions in favor of a
resolution sponsored by a core group of nations, including the United States,
that calls on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to conduct a
comprehensive investigation into allegations of serious violations and abuses
of human rights by both sides.
The
high commissioner, Navi Pillay, had urged the creation
of an independent inquiry on the grounds that the Sri Lankan
authorities had made little progress in investigating possible war crimes
during the military operations that finally crushed the Tamil Tigers’ brutal
rebellion to establish a homeland five years ago.
That
lack of progress, Ms. Pillay added pointedly in a report to the council in
February, is “fundamentally a question of political will.” Sri Lankan
investigations of the military’s actions lack independence and credibility, she
added.
Thursday’s
vote marks the culmination of years of mounting
international pressure for a credible investigation. Two months
after the war ended, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution commending
Sri Lanka’s actions in ending it.
An
independent international inquiry is “long overdue,” Julie de Rivero, Geneva
advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said after the vote. “It will shed light
once and for all on the atrocities that took place during the last phase of the
war in Sri Lanka,” she added, and represents an essential step to hold both
sides to account.
Thursday’s
vote came after Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the council, Ravinatha Aryasinha,
protested that the resolution represented “a grave threat to the sovereignty of
U.N. member states” and breached international law. He found support from
Russia, China and other nations hostile to country-specific action by the
council.
Ambassador
Zamir Akram of Pakistan said, “This resolution is about politics, not about
human rights.” He moved to delay the vote on the grounds that the human rights
office lacked the resources to carry out the investigation, and then proposed
to delete a reference to an independent investigation.
India,
which had supported tamer resolutions on Sri Lanka’s war in the last two years,
backed both proposals, but abstained when the vote on the resolution came up,
saying it was concerned about the creation of an external investigation with an
open-ended mandate.
The
focus of the investigation will be the carnage that unfolded in the military
campaign at the end of the war, a time when up to 40,000 civilians are reported
to have died, mainly as a result of heavy military bombardment of areas in
which the military had encouraged them to assemble.
But the
resolution also expresses concern about what the United States has said is the
continuing deterioration of human rights in Sri Lanka, including continuing
abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings, and it calls on the human
rights office to continue monitoring and reporting on Sri Lanka’s human rights
status.
Correction:
March 27, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. He is Zamir Akram, not Zahir.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. He is Zamir Akram, not Zahir.
