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South Africa has formally demanded that the new global agreement on climate change be in the form of a protocol with targets, commitments and actions for all parties. The move breaks the united stand the BASIC group of countries — Brazil, India, China and South Africa — had taken to keep the options open on the legal form of the new agreement, to be signed by 2015 and made operational from 2020. At the Durban conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2010, with India especially insisting, it was decided that the legal form of the new agreement would not be decided until the content of the new deal is well known. In keeping with this, the options on the table were left open with the countries deciding that the new agreement would be in the form of ‘a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with a legal force’.