Photo: AFTINET

The 11th Round of Negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement negotiations between Australia, the US, New Zealand, Malaysia and four other countries starts in Melbourne on March 1. Civil society groups from those countries are in that city to contest corporate influence and debate the issues.

“Although most central banks are independent, they are in the end government bodies. As such, central banks are subject to the human rights obligations of their state,” argues in its second publication the initiative “A bottom up approach to righting financial regulation”, a consortium of civil society networks and organizations, including Social Watch and some of its members.

A farmer and her child in a MONLAR-supported garden. (Photo: Mahjabeen Chowdhury/PWRDF)

Ensuring guaranteed and diverse seed supplies and crop production has been an important part of the work of the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform in Sri Lanka (MONLAR), focal point of Social Watch in Sri Lanka. Here is the story of one family who, with its support, has been able improve both its diet and its income through bio-diverse agricultural practices.

Demonstration in Athens convened by Syntagma movement on February 19. (Foto: odysseasgr/Flickr/CC)

The terms of the European 'bailouts' as the one approved this week for Greece – the severe public spending cuts, the onslaught on public ownership – all reflect the experience of the developing world in the 1980s and ’90s, according to Nick Dearden, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign. “The precise purpose of these policies” was “to shift the burden of financial crisis from the financial system and onto developing nations,” he warned.

Yemenis protesting against the government in Sana’a. (Photo: UN News Centre)

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and its partners in Yemen – the Human Rights Information and Training Center (HRITC, national focal point of Social Watch) and the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedom (HOOD) — call on the United States government to uphold its international responsibilities and open an investigation into torture against former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is in the North American country now.