Jonathan promises to involve more youths in governance, if re-elected

President Goodluck Jonathan has pledged to
get more Nigerian youth involved in governance if
re-elected.

The President also said that he would be driving
‘Made in Nigeria cars’ very soon and would have
them as part of his convoy to demonstrate
confidence in the growth of automobile industry in
the country under his administration.

NAN reports that the Jonathan gave the assurance
at an interactive session with a across section of
Nigerian youth in Lagos.

The event “Meet The President”, was organised by
a group called the Participate, Vote for Your Choice
Candidate (PVC) and was held at the Eko Hotel and
Suites, Lagos.

Responding to some of the questions, the Jonathan
said that his administration had involved many
young Nigerians at all levels of governance and
would involve more in his second tenure.

“We have had different programmes for the
Nigerian youths including job creation, employment
and scholarships.

“We have been working with a number of young
people from grass root to the national level and will
get more young people involved.”

The President expressed appreciation for the
opportunity to hear directly from the youth.
“I intend to make this kind of interaction a part of
our administration by going round the six geo political
zones for town hall meetings with the youth.

“If the President will get this kind of for a regularly
it will help in understanding the youth and their
desires” he said.

Jonathan explained that it had not been easy to
hold such interactive sessions in the past due to
time constrains.

“Governance is a serious business. I know many will
wonder why this is holding now that elections are
near. It is because when elections are getting close
the president spends time going round.

“After the President is inaugurated, much of the
time is spent working on issues that will benefit the
country.

“But we will find time in our busy schedule to make
this more regular in coming year” he added.

He also explained that his visits to Baga, Mubi and
other North Eastern states few days ago were not
as a result of the imminent elections.

“As the Commander In Chief, I rely on intelligence
reports to make such moves.”

Monroe Freedman, Expert on Legal Ethics, Dies at 86

Monroe H. Freedman, a dominant figure in legal
ethics, whose work helped chart the course of
lawyers’ behavior in the late 20th century and
beyond, died on Thursday at his home in
Manhattan. He was 86.

His granddaughter Rebeca Izquierdo Lodhi
confirmed the death.

At his death, he was a professor of law at Hofstra
University , on Long Island. Professor Freedman’s
book “ Understanding Lawyers’ Ethics ,” written
with Abbe Smith and currently in its fourth
edition, is assigned in law schools throughout the
country.

“He invented legal ethics as a serious academic
subject,” Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard Law
School professor, said in a telephone interview
on Monday. “Prior to Freedman, legal ethics was
usually a lecture given by the dean of the law
school, which resembled chapel: ‘Thou shalt not
steal. Thou shalt not be lazy.’ But Monroe
brought to the academy the realistic complexity
of what lawyers actually face.”

For half a century Professor Freedman was, by
his own account and that of colleagues, a gleeful
jurisprudential provocateur. On one occasion, he
waggishly titled a law-review article “ In Praise of
Overzealous Representation: Lying to Judges,
Deceiving Third Parties and Other Ethical
Conduct.” On another, he moved a future chief
justice of the United States Supreme Court to call
for his disbarment.

In his published writings and his many
interviews in the news media, Professor
Freedman persistently raised questions about
lawyers’ professional conduct that entailed deep
reflection, impassioned argument and — all too
often — discomforting answers.

“He was on my speed dial for everything I ever
did involving legal ethics,” Professor Dershowitz
said. “And I brought him to my classes every
single year: A legal education without Monroe
Freedman was incomplete.”

Drawing on a scholarly background that let him
invoke Hebrew Scripture, Christian Gospels, St.
Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant in support
of his legal arguments, Professor Freedman was
concerned in particular with defining the scope
of lawyers’ responsibilities toward their clients.
Central to his concern was the lawyer-client
relationship as it played out in criminal court.

“It is 50 years since the case of Gideon v.
Wainwright ,” the noted civil-rights lawyer
Michael E. Tigar said on Monday, invoking the
landmark Supreme Court case of 1963 that
established a criminal defendant’s right to an
attorney. “The law books are full of cases of what
is now called ‘ineffective assistance of counsel.’
Monroe championed a view of the lawyer’s role
and responsibilities that makes the promise of
Gideon a reality.”

Professor Freedman’s views on ethics sprang
from his early work as a civil-liberties lawyer,
and throughout his career he maintained that the
two fields should dovetail seamlessly.

“That’s how he saw legal ethics,” his co-author
Professor Smith, who teaches at the Georgetown
University Law Center, said on Monday. “To him,
access to justice was — and is — central.”

At midcentury, for instance, Professor Freedman
took the American Bar Association to task on
civil libertarian grounds for its longstanding ban
on professional advertising. For one thing, he
argued, the ban violated lawyers’ First
Amendment rights. For another, he said, it
denied low-income Americans ready access to
information about legal services. His work helped
pave the way for the lifting of the ban in 1977.

Likewise, as Professor Freedman told the CBS
News program “60 Minutes” in 1994, “I believe
that there is a professional responsibility on the
part of lawyers to chase ambulances.” He added:

“We are here to help members of the public. And
we are not helping members of the public the
way we’re supposed to do it if we are not there
to tell people who are ignorant of their rights
that they’ve got rights.”

In 1966, in what was undoubtedly his most
controversial public stance, Professor Freedman
published an article in The Michigan Law Review
titled “ Professional Responsibility of the Criminal
Defense Lawyer : The Three Hardest Questions.”

In it, he argued that a lawyer’s obligation to
represent clients vigorously (and to protect their
privacy just as vigorously) should trump all other
considerations — including the lawyer’s
knowledge that a client plans to lie on the stand.

Though lawyers should advise clients not to
commit perjury, Professor Freedman wrote, if it
became clear that the client was going to anyway
— or already had — the lawyer’s overriding
obligation was to remain silent.

“His argument is still resonating in the halls of
every courtroom and every deposition, because
perjury is still rampant in our legal system,”
Professor Dershowitz said on Monday. “He wrote
the article to provoke a discussion.”

But what it provoked was a firestorm. Several
prominent jurists, including Warren E. Burger,
then a federal appellate judge and later the
United States chief justice, called, without success,
for Professor Freedman’s disbarment.

“Monroe’s position was really based upon a view
that the lawyer’s primary obligation is the
defense of a client who is, after all, facing an
adversary with superior resources,” Professor
Tigar explained. “And with everything arrayed
against the accused, Monroe put this primary
value on the advocate’s obligation of undivided
loyalty and zeal.”

Monroe Henry Freedman was born on April 10,
1928, in Mount Vernon, N.Y.; his parents,
Chauncey Freedman and the former Dorothea
Kornblum, ran a pharmacy there. The young Mr.
Freedman earned a bachelor’s degree from
Harvard, followed by bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from Harvard Law School.

Near the start of his career, Professor Freedman
served as a volunteer counsel to the Mattachine
Society , the early gay-rights group; from 1960 to
1964, he was a consultant to the United States
Commission on Civil Rights. In the early 1980s,
he was the first executive director of what
became the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum .

Professor Freedman taught at George
Washington University before joining Hofstra in
1973. As the dean of Hofstra’s law school from
then until 1977, he was credited with helping to
give the school, founded in 1970, a national
profile as a teaching and research institution. He
was also a visiting professor at Georgetown.

Professor Freedman’s wife, the former Audrey
Willock, whom he married in 1950, died in 1998.
Besides his granddaughter Ms. Izquierdo Lodhi,
his survivors include a brother, Eugene; a sister,
Penny; a son, Judah; a daughter, Alice; six other
grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A
son, Caleb, and a daughter, Sarah Freedman-
Izquierdo, died before him.

His other books include “Lawyers’ Ethics in an
Adversary System” (1975) and “Group
Defamation and Freedom of Speech: The
Relationship Between Language and
Violence” (1995), which he edited with Eric M.
Freedman. With Professor Smith, he was the
editor of “How Can You Represent Those
People?” (2013), a collection of articles about a
lawyer’s obligation to take on distasteful clients.

As an index of his willingness to puncture all
manner of sacred cows, Professor Freedman, in a
series of articles in the 1990s, squared off against
possibly the most venerated figure in American
jurisprudence: Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper
Lee’s 1960 novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Among the moral transgressions for which
Professor Freedman takes Finch to task is the fact
that he defends Tom Robinson, a black man
accused of raping a white woman, not
voluntarily but because he was appointed by the
court.

“Atticus Finch never in his professional life
voluntarily takes a pro bono case in an effort to
ameliorate the evil — which he himself and
others recognize — in the apartheid of Maycomb,
Ala.,” Professor Freedman wrote in The Alabama
Law Review in 1994.

“Throughout his relatively comfortable and
pleasant life in Maycomb, Atticus Finch knows
about the grinding, ever-present humiliation and
degradation of the black people of Maycomb; he
tolerates it; and sometimes he even trivializes
and condones it.”

Professor Freedman added:

“For Finch, the civil rights movement of the
1960s is inevitable, but decades too soon.”

Charlotte Spiegel, Politician Who Safeguarded New York’s Windows, Dies at 92

Charlotte Spiegel, a civic leader and Democratic
politician from the Lower East Side who created
New York’s pioneering, lifesaving window guard
program in the 1970s, died on Friday in
Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death, at NYU Langone Medical Center, was
confirmed by her daughter Maura Spiegel.

As director of the health department’s Window
Falls Prevention Program, Ms. Spiegel
transformed what was a modest but promising
publicity campaign, called Children Can’t Fly,
into a formal health code requirement that
landlords provide window guards to tenants in
apartments occupied by children age 10 and
under.

It was widely described as the first window
guard requirement in the nation.

At first, the health department bought tens of
thousands of window guards at $3 apiece and
distributed them free of charge. When it ran out
of money, it shifted the burden to building
owners.

Landlords were originally required to install the
guards only if a tenant requested them. They
were later made responsible for determining
whether tenants were eligible for the guards and,
if so, installing them.

“If a child falls, the landlord is liable,” Ms.
Spiegel said, even if the landlord was the city’s
own Housing Authority, which she accused of
“foot dragging” in complying with the window
guard regulations.

In 1976, when the regulations were enacted, 217
children were injured in window falls and 24
died. In 2013, according to the health
department, six were injured and one died
falling from windows that should have been
equipped with guards.

A decade before the window guard campaign,
Ms. Spiegel found herself in the political
vanguard. In 1963, when Edward N. Costikyan
announced that he was retiring as the leader of
the Manhattan Democratic organization,
historically known as Tammany Hall, Ms. Spiegel
filled in as the acting New York County leader.

She was then elected chairwoman of the county’s
executive committee. She was the first woman to
hold each post.

Charlotte Sandra Neuman was born in
Manhattan on March 22, 1922, to Morris Neuman
and the former Ida Mitnitsky, a seamstress. An
uncle was treasurer of a Lower East Side
Democratic club. She was 15 when she was
admitted to Hunter College, having already
graduated from Washington Irving High School.

She went on to receive a master’s degree in
English from Columbia University, where she
overcame her painful shyness.

In 1944, she married Samuel A. Spiegel, who
represented the Lower East Side as an
assemblyman before being elected to the State
Supreme Court and to the Surrogate’s Court. He
died in 1977. Besides her daughter Maura, Ms.
Spiegel is survived by another daughter, Jill
Spiegel, and two grandchildren.

Ms. Spiegel taught in the same elementary school
that she had attended, Public School 188 on the
Lower East Side, worked briefly for a public
relations company and was a partner in a small
interior decorating firm before she got involved
in civic groups, like the Grand Street Settlement
House and the League of Women Voters, and
Democratic politics.

In 1985, when she was 63, Ms. Spiegel was on a
cruise with the ship Achille Lauro when it was
hijacked in the Mediterranean by Palestinian
terrorists. She was one of the so-called beach
people who vacationed in the same condominium
complex on the Jersey Shore and was among 11
of them who had taken the cruise together.

Ms. Spiegel was one of five members of the group
who were not on board when the hijacking took
place; they were on a bus tour in Egypt at the
time, from Alexandria to Port Said. Her
childhood friend Leon Klinghoffer, who was in a
wheelchair, was shot and thrown overboard. His
wife, Marilyn, survived the hijacking and died a
year later.

Maura Spiegel recalled that her mother was
appointed to the health department directorship
by Mayor Abraham D. Beame , after she had
worked on his 1973 campaign and lost the
clubhouse district leadership she had held for
nearly two decades.

In government, Ms. Spiegel discovered how much
she could still accomplish, even during a fiscal
crisis, her daughter said. Under Children Can’t
Fly, her window guard program, reported falls
declined by 50 percent from 1973 to 1975.

Terrorism Case Against Pakistani Man Is Going to Jury

As arguments in Abid Naseer’s trial on terrorism
charges came to a close on Monday, jurors had
heard from British intelligence officers in
disguise, an F.B.I. attaché who observed Osama
bin Laden’s dead body and Mr. Naseer himself
arguing that he was an innocent man.

Mr. Naseer, 28, a Pakistani, is accused of
planning to attack a Manchester, England,
shopping mall in a plot by Al Qaeda that would
have also included the New York City subway
system and a Danish newspaper. But the alleged
plot was never carried out.

The strongest link between Mr. Naseer and
terrorist activity was in emails: a series of
messages that he wrote to the address
sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com that discussed
women and marriage in often-awkward phrases.

The Yahoo account was that of a Qaeda handler
who also corresponded with an admitted Qaeda
supporter and terrorist plotter, Najibullah Zazi .
Like Mr. Naseer’s emails to sana_pakhtana, Mr.

Zazi’s were full of references to his “marriage,”
which Mr. Zazi testified was code for a bombing
plot.

Mr. Naseer argued that his emails were innocent
chatter about girls with a friend he met in an
Internet chat room — who he had no idea was a
Qaeda affiliate.

Now, jurors in Federal District Court in Brooklyn
will decide which side to believe. Was Mr. Naseer
going into Tesco stores because that is what a
typical student in England would do? Or was he
scouting for bomb ingredients? Was he returning
home to Pakistan to see his family, or to train
with Al Qaeda? Did he delete all emails from his
account the day he sent his final email to the
sana_pakhtana address because he needed more
space, or because he was covering his tracks as
the attack neared?

In the government’s closing argument, a
prosecutor, Zainab Ahmad, hit on the danger of
the alleged plot.

“That man wanted to drive a car bomb into a
crowded shopping center and watch people die,”
she said.

She spent much of her time discussing the emails.
“The fact that Sohaib is emailing with the
defendant shows you the defendant is Al Qaeda,”
she said, using a name for the sana_pakhtana
account holder.

She dismissed exchanges like “How are you?” and
“What’s the weather like?” as “chitter-chatter.”

“They want to make these emails seem normal,”
Ms. Ahmad said. “They want to make sure these
emails don’t arouse suspicion.”

The important passages, she said, were those
where Mr. Naseer went into detail about women
and cars — a car bomb was one of the methods
he was considering, she said.

For instance, Mr. Naseer wrote once that a
woman named Huma seemed “weak and difficult
to convince.” That, Ms. Ahmad argued, referred
to a hydrogen peroxide bomb, which requires a
long time to become concentrated enough to
work, though the prosecutor did not point to
evidence in the trial backing up that point.

“Think about what good code it is: two guys
speaking about cars and girls,” she said.
She also highlighted apparent inconsistencies in
Mr. Naseer’s argument. In Mr. Naseer’s final
email to the sana_pakhtana address, days before
he was arrested in England, he refers to his
wedding later in the month.

Mr. Naseer had broken up with his girlfriend by
that point and was not speaking to her, Ms.
Ahmad said, making it hard to believe that he
was planning to marry her. In the email, he also
says he wishes sana_pakhtana could be at the
wedding. Either “the defendant wants his
random Internet friend to come to his wedding,”
Ms. Ahmad said, or he is alerting his Qaeda
handler that an attack is ready.

Mr. Naseer is representing himself, and much of
his summation was tedious; he spent more than
two hours reading transcripts aloud.

However, when he broke from that, he was
engaging, making eye contact with jurors as he
read from a white legal pad as he said that the
government had not proved its case.

“Did anyone say anything about the defendant’s
extremist views?” he said. “Did anyone give
evidence to the fact that Abid Naseer and his
friends were preparing explosive material?”

Did anyone say “that I’m the one who can tell
you that the defendant Abid Naseer was trained
by Al Qaeda?” he said. Did anyone “tell the court
during this trial that Abid Naseer is connected to
Al Qaeda?”

“We all know the answer. It is a two-letter word:
no,” he said.

“With all the resources, with all the PowerPoint
slides,” he said, “with all this showing off, no
promise was fulfilled.”

He argued that he had represented himself and
testified “so he can be candid and honest about
everything.”

He also told jurors that he and the men arrested
with him in Britain were released by the
authorities there because “there was insufficient
evidence to prosecute anybody by the U.K.

government,” which is consistent with earlier
accounts of the case.

Jurors will begin deliberating on Tuesday about
whether Mr. Naseer provided support to a
terrorist organization, was part of a conspiracy
providing support to a terrorist organization,
and conspired to use a destructive device (a
bomb, in this case).

China Names 14 Generals Suspected of Corruption

BEIJING — China’s military authority on Monday
released a list of 14 generals who are under
investigation or have been convicted of graft,
among them the son of one of China’s once
highest-ranking generals.

The generals were the latest prominent officers
to fall under President Xi Jinping’s sweeping
anticorruption campaign.

Published on the official website of the People’s
Liberation Army three days before China’s
rubber-stamp legislature convenes for its annual
meeting in Beijing, the list identifies a host of
leading officers, the majority of whom are in the
political and logistics departments of the
military, navy, missile corps and other branches.

The investigators’ focus on the military
bureaucracy highlights two distinct types of
corruption that the Communist Party believes
undermine military readiness, experts say:
bribery in political departments relating to the
sale of positions; and embezzlement within
logistics departments, which handle large
amounts of money as well as contracts.

Among those being investigated is Rear Adm.
Guo Zhenggang, the son of Guo Boxiong, the
retired vice chairman of the powerful Central
Military Commission, which oversees the 2.3
million members of China’s armed forces, the
world’s largest.

Admiral Guo, 45, the deputy political commissar
of military command in the coastal province of
Zhejiang, was put under investigation last month,
suspected of “serious legal violations and
criminal offenses,” a common official euphemism
for corruption.

In what appeared to be a well-timed media
campaign coordinated to discredit the admiral,
the investigative magazine Caijing published a
long exposé of his family’s corrupt land dealings
online, 10 minutes after the list of generals was
released.

According to the article, Admiral Guo’s wife and
mother-in-law were sued by investors after their
real estate company took in over 500 million
renminbi, more than $80 million, to build a five-
story hardware market that was never
completed.

Speculation that members of the Guo family were
being investigated on corruption charges has
swirled for months, despite the government’s
attempts to keep their names off social media.
Last year, the elder Mr. Guo, once the military’s
top uniformed officer, was rumored to have tried
to flee the country dressed in women’s clothing.

Although there was no proof verifying the rumor,
censors quickly blocked search terms like “Guo +
dress in drag” on the popular microblog platform
Sina Weibo, according to China Digital Times, a
website based in Berkeley, Calif., that covers
China news and digital media. Mr. Guo has not
officially been accused of corruption.

The military notice also announced that Lan
Weijie, a former deputy commander in the
central province of Hubei, was sentenced to life
in prison in January for accepting bribes,
owning property purchased with “unidentified
sources” and the illegal possession of firearms.

Last year, China’s widening military corruption
scandal ensnared the military’s former No. 2
official, Xu Caihou, who was indicted in October
on bribery charges. Mr. Xu is one of the highest-
ranking targets of the anticorruption campaign
begun by President Xi, who is also head of the
Central Military Commission.

Mr. Xi has vowed to clean up the military as part
of his campaign to strengthen party rule by
reining in corruption. The campaign comes as
China is upgrading its military capabilities to
bolster claims over disputed maritime territories
in the South and East China Seas, with an eye on
countering the influence of the United States in
Asia and the Pacific.

On Monday, the People’s Liberation Army
published a separate commentary on its website
lauding the investigations as proof that the
military was serious about fighting corruption.

“They show the military’s courage to cut the
poison off the bones with a knife and make steel
out of raging fire,” it said, adding, “Let us praise
the People’s Army that is truly worthy of the
people’s trust.”

But the military’s anticorruption drive also
appears intended to fortify Mr. Xi’s hold on
power by targeting rival factions and alerting
members of his own about the limits of
corruption he will tolerate, according to Phillip C.

Saunders, director of the Center for the Study of
Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense
University in Washington.

So far, investigators have only investigated
former senior members of the Central Military
Commission, rather than those appointed by Mr. Xi.

“It seems to be strategic in who they’re going
after and not going after,” Mr. Saunders said.
“There are people being made an example of
within the P.L.A., but it’s not the people at the
very top. This achieves the purpose of warning
them to tone down corruption without the
political cost.”

Libyan General’s Promotion Could Hinder United Nations Peace Talks

MISURATA, Libya — The speaker of Libya’s
internationally recognized Parliament named
Gen. Khalifa Hifter on Monday to the recently
created position of commander in chief of the
army, potentially hindering United Nations-
sponsored talks to end the country’s internal
strife.

General Hifter has had many roles: He was an
ally of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi when he came
to power; later became an opponent; returned to
join the uprising against him in 2011; and last
year announced an abortive military takeover of
Libya’s transitional government.

Since the spring of 2014, General Hifter has been
leading a military campaign with the stated goal
of ridding Libya of Islamists, whether they are
the extremists based in and around Benghazi or
the more moderate politicians who played a
major role in the first transitional Parliament.

A narrow majority of Libya’s internationally
recognized Parliament has been seated since last
summer in Tobruk, an eastern Libyan town
under Mr. Hifter’s control, where it has aligned
itself with his efforts. His appointment on
Monday for the first time gives him formal
legitimacy as the top military commander under
that government. The appointment should
ostensibly make General Hifter accountable to
Parliament.

But he and certain regional militias allied with
him are fighting a rival militia coalition that
includes both hard-line and more moderate
Islamists, and that coalition, known as Libya
Dawn, considers the general an aspiring autocrat
and its greatest enemy. Libya Dawn controls the
capital, Tripoli. It claims its own provisional
Parliament and prime minister, and it includes
the city of Misurata on the central coast.

The United States, Britain and other allies have
been hoping to help broker an agreement
between the two factions. They have threatened
to use sanctions to isolate those on either side
who oppose a reconciliation, including trying to
marginalize the Islamist extremists in the Dawn
faction and General Hifter, who christened his
military campaign Operation Dignity. His
appointment as commander in chief may make it
harder to separate him from the Tobruk-based
Parliament and the rest of the faction.

Many in eastern Libya have embraced General
Hifter as their best hope to tame extremist
militias that have dominated the eastern city of
Benghazi and to restore order to Libya. But
seemingly everyone in the Libya Dawn coalition,
meanwhile, rejects any government that includes
him.

“He just wants to be on top of the throne,” said
Fathi Bashaagha, a local leader in Misurata who
has participated in, and argued for, the unity
talks. “If any unity government appoints Hifter,
he will eat the unity government.”

Europe Unlikely to Meet Climate Goal, Study Finds

BERLIN — The European Union will fail to meet
an ambitious goal of significantly reducing
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 unless it takes
more aggressive measures to limit the use of
fossil fuels and adopts new environmental
policies, according to a report scheduled for
release on Tuesday.

Although European countries are on track to
meet, and even surpass, the goal of reducing
1990-level greenhouse gas emissions by 20
percent by 2020, existing policies are not robust
enough to ensure that the 2050 targets are met,
the report said. Those targets, scientists have
said, are critical to forestalling the most
catastrophic effects of climate change , which are
linked to carbon emissions caused by human
activity.

“The level of ambition of environmental policies
currently in place to reduce environmental
pressures may not enable Europe to achieve long-
term environmental goals, such as the 2050 target
of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95
percent,” the report said.

The report also noted that transportation
continues to account for a quarter of all carbon
emissions within the European Union, and
reducing those by 60 percent by 2050 will require
“significant additional measures.”

The report, which will formally be released on
Tuesday, was compiled by the European
Environment Agency, based in Copenhagen, and
is produced every five years to assess how the
Union is progressing toward its environmental
goals and to inform European policy. It will be
presented to the European Commission and
debated in the European Parliament later this
month.

The findings are significant because Europeans
have taken a lead role in seeking to avert the
worst effects of climate change , in some cases
putting aside their own economic prospects and
political pressures to enact policies that could also
serve as models for other countries and regions.

The European Union’s failure to achieve its goals
could discourage efforts by more reluctant
nations, like China and India, and could loom
large later this year as nations gather in Paris to
discuss a global climate treaty.

Hans Bruyninckx, the executive director of the
European Environment Agency, characterized
the report as an alarming call that provides the
28 European Union member states with a fresh
opportunity to set a global example.

“Although we have colored the outlook red, it
doesn’t have to be red,” Mr. Bruyninckx said. He
named increased energy efficiency, ecological
innovation and improvements to transportation
systems as potential areas in which Europeans
could adjust their policies to meet their long-term
goals.

“Although we have all of these very different
countries with very different energy profiles, in
the long run, the commitment to these targets is
there, the level of ambition to reach the 80
percent is high on the political agenda,” Mr.
Bruyninckx said.

Setting global emissions targets, however, has
proved elusive for years, and the latest
assessment of Europe’s progress illustrates that
once targets are reached, significant difficulties
remain in holding countries to their agreed-to
goals.

Even a country like Germany, where support for
the environment borders on a religion, has faced
unforeseen challenges as it aims to revamp its
energy sector from reliance on traditional
sources of energy, such as nuclear and fossil
fuels, to renewable sources, including wind, solar
and biofuels.

The race to shutter the country’s nuclear reactors
by 2022, for example, has resulted in many
power providers using brown coal, or lignite, the
cheapest and dirtiest of all fossil fuels to keep the
power flowing to customers. This, in turn, has led
to an increase in carbon emissions.

According to the report, Germany, whose
economy is the best in Europe, was the only
country with a significant rise in both its
emissions reductions and energy consumption
last year. Along with Belgium, it is one of only
two countries not on track to meet its 2020
targets in either category. According to the
German Association of Energy and Water
Industries, the country increased its carbon
omissions by 20 million tons from 2012 to 2013,
instead of reducing them.

In order to meet its goals, Germany must reduce
emissions annually by 3.5 percent over the next
six years, a feat that will result in substantial
increases in energy costs, and generate political
pressure to block measures that could hurt the
economy.

Harro van Asselt, a researcher at the Stockholm
Environment Institute’s Oxford Centre, said
Germany saw a drop in emissions after many
polluting industrial sites in the former East
Germany were shuttered between the late 1990s
and early 2000s. The closings occurred just as
Europe began tackling climate change, which
assisted the European Union in meeting its 2020
targets, he said.

“The question is not why they might stumble
now; the main question is why did they reach
their targets before,” Mr. van Asselt said.
Now the hard part begins, he said, as the
European Union faces the need to undertake
more difficult and costly measures in areas like
transportation and agriculture to ensure that
emissions targets remain on track.

“As long as the European Commission doesn’t
undertake more measures in these sectors, they
are going to have difficulties in even reaching
their goals for 2030,” Mr. van Asselt said.
Globally, the environmental news is not all bleak.
The United States failed to adopt the Kyoto
Protocol in 1997, in part because Congress feared
it would hurt the country economically. But last
year President Obama and President Xi Jinping
of China reached an agreement that set new goals
for those countries to curb their carbon
emissions within the next 15 years. The deal was
seen as a breakthrough, helping to resolve some
of the differences between two of the world’s
biggest polluters, whose dispute was partly the
reason a climate agreement was not reached in
Copenhagen in 2009.

European leaders are counting on recent
international efforts to help reach a global
agreement in Paris. The most recent report
issued by the United Nations last year warned
that failure to reduce emissions could alter the
climate so drastically that it could endanger life
as we know it. The Europeans hope this added
pressure, coupled with the moral example they
tried to set decades ago, will contribute to a
lasting global agreement on emissions
reductions.

“I think the role of Europe is essential and we
have demonstrated that we can make solid
multinational agreements that can work,” Mr.
Bruyninckx said.