24th G8 summit


The 24th G8 Summit was held in Birmingham, England, United Kingdom on 15–17 May 1998. The venue for this summit meeting was the International Convention Centre.
The Group of Seven 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 Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Germany's chancellor Helmut Schmidt as they conceived the initial summit of the Group of Six in 1975.

Leaders at the summit

The G8 is an unofficial annual forum for the leaders of Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The 24th G8 summit was the last summit for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto.

Participants

These summit participants are the current "core members" of the international forum:

Deliberations

The summit was intended as a venue for resolving differences among its members. As a practical matter, the summit was also conceived as an opportunity for its members to give each other mutual encouragement in the face of difficult economic decisions. Traditionally, the host country of a G8 summit sets the agenda for negotiations, which take place primarily amongst multi-national civil servants in the weeks before the summit itself, leading to a joint declaration which all countries can agree to sign.
The summit issued an "Action Program on Forests", which focused on five themes:
  1. monitoring and assessment
  2. national forest programmes
  3. protected areas
  4. private sector
  5. illegal logging
and made a pledge to report back on progress in 2000. One view published in 2000 found little evidence of follow-up action or programme, but a formal report on implementation was drawn together for the Kyushu Okinawa Summit in July 2000, which included country-by-country reports on implementation.
Outside the summit, a reported assembly of around 70,000 people formed a human chain around the city, demonstrating concern regarding the indebted poverty of many poor countries and the need for international leaders to take action to remit that debt.

Criticisms

For some, the G8 summit became a profit-generating event; as for example, the official G8 Summit magazines which have been published under the auspices of the host nations for distribution to all attendees since 1998.

Core G8 participants