Aid should be tied to military budgets, UN meeting told

United Nations signatories ought to deny aid to countries whose military budgets exceed their health and education budgets, the world's first Muslim female Nobel Prize winner said Thursday.

Dr. Shirin Ebadi offered some radical suggestions for meeting the goals set out in 2000 for combating poverty, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, fighting AIDS and ensuring environmental sustainability.

"We have to come up with a convention for the eradication of poverty," she told some 3,000 anti-poverty advocates, world leaders and celebrity activists at the third annual Millennium Summit in Montreal.

"It should be passed by the UN General Assembly and countries should be encouraged to join the convention."

As part of the convention, she said, all countries should reduce their military budgets and financial aid should be extended only to those whose military budgets don't exceed those of health and education.

She also suggested countries with foreign debt that are unable to pay might have their debt forgiven if they agree to dissolve their militaries and rely strictly on police for security.

"What is the purpose of having a military, specifically for poor countries, and to spend the majority of resources on their militaries?" the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist said through a translator.

She also called for corruption to be treated as a "crime against humanity," punishable through the international criminal court.

"I know that in 2009 today, my words are like a dream," she said. "Our challenge here is [not just] to dream, but to take action."

UN deputy secretary-general Asha-Rose Migiro refused to comment on the idea, stressing instead the need for the international community to stay true to its "millennium development goals" which set a deadline of 2015 despite the global economic downturn.

Citing World Bank figures, she said 53 million people were pushed back into poverty last year, while another 46 million are expected to join them this year.

Another 51 million are losing their jobs and 40 million more are going hungry, she said, noting the global food crisis, volatile energy prices and climate change are exacerbating the problem.

"We cannot accept the notion that the crisis makes it more difficult to deliver on our aid commitments," she said.

"It should be the reverse. A crisis makes it more important to deliver on our aid commitments."

Investing in aid to developing nations, she added, will effectively spur the West's own economic recovery.

Millennium development goals campaign director Salil Shetty also slammed Canada for failing to meet its own goal, set out by former prime minister Lester B. Pearson nearly 40 years ago, to allot 0.7 per cent of its GDP to international development.

Canada's contribution currently stands at 0.32 per cent and has been going down rather than up, he said.

"Our leaders are very good at making promises, they're not very good at keeping them," he said.

Hollywood's Mia Farrow and Val Kilmer, as well as Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, were among the VIP speakers at the event.

Farrow, who's visited the volatile Darfur region of Sudan 11 times, said the situation there is dire and that it's time to push western governments to do more.