December 4-5: Foreign Ministers of the North Atlantic Council will meet at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The statement of the Foreign Ministers’ April 27 Meeting reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to the development of the Afghan security and defense forces, as well as it urged the Taliban to participate in an “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led” peace process. The official program of the December meeting will be released closer to the date of the meeting. Of likely concern will be the recent naval standoff between Russia and Ukraine.
December 6: Expert are expecting a production cut to be made during the meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna. This cut is predicted to stabilize the oil market which are currently “oversupplied”. On November 21, US President Donald Trump encouraged OPEC to reject output cuts and pushed for lower prices on Twitter.
December 10: Following the October 5 announcement of Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad as Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the award ceremony will take place on December 10 in Oslo. Mukwege and Murad will receive their Prize from the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the presence of King Harald V of Norway. They will also deliver lectures during the Award Ceremony.
December 10-11: The Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for Migrationwill be held in Marrakech, Morocco. The first ever agreement on a common approach to international migration was approved by 192 countries in July (the United States, notably, boycotted the agreement). In this conference, member states will confirm their political commitment to the compact. The UN envoy for international migration, Louise Arbour, has expressed disappointment over countries like Hungary, Austria, Israel, Poland, Switzerland, and Australia dropping their support for the compact in recent months and deciding not to attend the conference. Reservations have also been expressed by Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
December 13-14: The European Council will convene with EU leaders present from December 13-14. At hand will be budgetary issues in the long-term, but also migration and the fighting of disinformation. The meeting will also see an extension of the bloc’s economic sanctions against Russia’s defense, energy and banking sectors. The sanctions were first introduced after Russia annexed Crimea. Tusk told a news conference at the G20 that “Europe is united in its support to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is why I am sure that the EU will roll over the sanctions against Russia in December.”
Early December: Peace talks to end the conflict in Yemen are scheduled to take place in Sweden early in the month of December, though some have cautioned that there’s no guarantee Saudi Arabia will take the steps needed for the talks to happen. The conflict of nearly four years between a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Houthi rebels backed by Iran has killed around 57,000 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a crisis mapping project. The UN has put the death toll at 10,000, but that estimate has not been updated for years. Yemen is on the brink of starvation, with 14 million lives at risk in what the UN describes as possibly the worst famine in 100 years.
More at theglobalobservatory.org/2018/11/key-global-events-to-watch-in-december-2018/