Safeguard

In international law a safeguard is a restraint on international trade or economic development to protect communities from development aggression or home industries from foreign competition.

In the World Trade Organization (WTO) system, a member may take a safeguard action, such as restricting imports of a product temporarily, to protect a domestic industry from an increase in imports causing, or threatening to cause, injury to domestic production.

In the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, safeguards are intended to protect indigenous peoples and other local communities with traditional knowledge of natural resource management, within efforts towards reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

The WTO and UNFCCC concepts are related within international law.

Background

With UNFCC processes, safeguards became of concern in the second decade of the 21st century.

Within the WTO, safeguard measures were available under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (Article XIX). However, they were infrequently used, and some governments preferred to protect their industries through “grey area” measures (“voluntary” export restraint arrangements on products such as cars, steel and semiconductors). As part of the WTO deal, members gave up these “grey area” measures and adopted a specific WTO Safeguards Agreement which disciplines the use of safeguard measures.

Safeguard Program

The Safeguard Program was a US Army anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system designed to protect the US Air Force's Minuteman ICBM farms from attack, thus preserving the US's nuclear deterrent fleet. It was intended primarily to protect against the very small Chinese ICBM fleet, limited Soviet attacks and various other limited launch scenarios. A full-scale attack by the Soviets would easily overwhelm it, a deliberate point to ensure they did not consider it a strategic threat. It was designed to allow gradual upgrades to provide similar lightweight coverage over the entire United States over time.

Safeguard was the ultimate development of a system originally designed by Bell Labs in the mid-1950s as the Nike Zeus. By 1960 it was clear that Zeus offered almost no protection against a sophisticated attack using decoys. A new design emerged, Nike-X, with the ability to defend against attacks with hundreds of warheads and thousands of decoys, but the cost of the system was enormous. Looking for alternatives, the Sentinel program examined offering a very lightweight cover that would protect against limited attacks. Sentinel began construction in 1968 but ran into a firestorm of protest over its bases being placed in suburban areas. In March 1969, incoming president Richard Nixon announced that Sentinel would be cancelled and redirected to protect the missile farms, so its bases would be placed well away from any civilian areas.

Safeguard (magazine)

Safeguard is a New Zealand magazine devoted to occupational health and safety. It features articles and information on managing health and safety in the workplace and is aimed at employers in all industries and at health and safety professionals. The magazine was launched as a quarterly in 1988 by the Occupational Safety and Health Service (OSH) of the Department of Labour. It was subsequently taken over by a commercial company, Colour Workshop. Safeguard is now published bi-monthly by Thomson Reuters (Auckland).

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