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By Sfundo Parakozov
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Sunday that the Leaders’ Declaration from this weekend’s Group of 20 summit reflected a “renewed commitment to multilateral cooperation”.
Ramaphosa, host of the Johannesburg summit, pushed through the declaration addressing global challenges like the climate crisis despite objections from the United States, which boycotted the event.
Addressing the summit’s closing ceremony, Ramaphosa said the declaration showed that world leaders’ “shared goals outweigh our differences”.
U.S. President Donald Trump boycotted the November 22-23 summit because of allegations – which have been widely debunked – that the host country’s Black majority government persecutes its white minority.
SUMMIT COMES AMID TENSIONS OVER UKRAINE, CLIMATE
Trump had also rejected South Africa’s agenda of promoting solidarity and helping developing nations adapt to worsening weather disasters, transition to clean energy and cut their excessive debt costs.
But Ramaphosa secured consensus from the leaders present at the summit, the first on the African continent, for a joint declaration using the kind of language long disliked by the U.S. administration.
The summit document stressed the seriousness of climate change and the need to better adapt to it, praising ambitious targets to boost renewable energy and noting the punishing levels of debt service charges suffered by poor countries.
The summit came at a time of heightened tensions between world powers over Russia’s war in Ukraine, and fraught climate negotiations at COP30 in Brazil.
The U.S. takes over the rotating G20 presidency after the Johannesburg summit, but South Africa rejected a U.S. proposal to send an embassy official for the handover in Trump’s place, saying it was a breach of protocol.
The White House has accused Ramaphosa of refusing to facilitate a smooth transition of the G20 presidency.
(Reporting by Sfundo Parakozov; Writing by Alexander Winning; Editing by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and David Holmes)
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