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“Means and ends”: Social Watch publishes first country reports 2013
Over sixty national Social Watch coalitions around the world are contributing their assessments and reports to the global Social Watch report 2013, under the overall theme of "Ends and Means." The Social Watch network thus joins the current global discussions around a set of Sustainable Development Goals and on a new development framework to be put in place when the MDGs expire in 2015.
The Social Watch national platforms are independent coalitions of civil society organizations struggling for social and gender justice in their own countries. The Social Watch network has been publishing since 1996 yearly reports on how governments implement their international commitments to eradicate poverty and achieve equality between women and men.
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Bangladesh: An urgent call for financial and climate justice
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Dhaka, capital city of
Bangladesh, under the water in
2004. (Photo: EquityBD)
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The international community must rule out the “one size fits all” approach and design an “effective sets of goals” needed to ensure a sustainable development, letting the solutions to be defined by each country, recommends the Social Watch coalition in Bangladesh, a nation severely affected by climate change. The new framework must ensure “equity”, “justice”, “the preservation of Mother Earth and the life and livelihood of all human beings,” adds the Bangladeshi contribution to the Social Watch Report 2013.
“A strong reform of the international financial institutions’ (IFIs) structure” is also required, so the decisions of these bodies should be made in a participatory manner. “There should be a ‘one member, one vote’ policy,” suggest the report, written by Zahid Rahman and Choyn Kumar Shaha (Unnayan Sammanay), and Mujibul Haque Munir (EquityBD).
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Paraguay: A broken contract
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Pro-democratic demonstration
in Asunción, in june.
(Photo: Decidamos-Paraguay)
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“The social contract was broken” in Paraguay by the “parliamentary coup” that ousted President Fernando Lugo on 22 June 2012, warns Decidamos, a campaign for citizen rights, in its contribution to the Social Watch Report 2013. The new government is reversing a decade-long trend to increase social expenditure and increased by 30% the budget allocation for the police and the armed forces.
Twenty years after the transition to democracy, citizens in Paraguay still lack mechanisms to defend their rights and make public servants and politicians accountable. The state is responsive to interests groups and private influences and thus unable to meet even the minimum targets spelled out in the MDGs, that should have been easy to accomplish with quality policies.
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France: Poverty takes root and feminizes
Women and immigrants living in France have been hit hardest in France by the global economic crisis, according to Secours Catholique. Women account for 57 percent of people seeking help from this member organization of the Social Watch network, almost 10 percent more than a decade ago. In the past decade, poverty in France, far from diminishing, has taken root. Getting out of the poverty trap is taking longer than ever before.
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Bulgarian government continuously overlooks the realization of ESCR
“The Bulgarian government continues the trends of sacrificing social and economic rights of the citizens with the justification of economic and financial stability, thus continuing to sustain the phenomenon of ‘stability in poverty’,” warned last week the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation (BGRF, member of Social Watch since 1999) in its report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
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Philippines: MDGs hindered by inequality, unemployment and environmental degradation
“It’s not just money that’s required for achieving the MDGs. Another reason why we are so behind with them is the Philippines’ warped development. Yes, there is economic growth, but it has been accompanied by greater inequality, unemployment, underemployment and environmental degradation,” wrote Jessica Cantos, Co-Convener of Social Watch Philippines, in a report published by New Internationalist, newspaper specialized on issues of world poverty and inequality.
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Egypt: Morsi acts against democratization, warn human rights groups
The constitutional declaration issued by the Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi last week “contravened the revolution’s goals of democratization and exploited the expansive powers he granted to himself shortly after his election to arrogate unparalleled powers and immunize his decisions against judicial oversight,” warned 22 human rights organizations.
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New barriers to developing country farmers’ participation in global forum
The Council of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) adopted this month new rules on the granting of observer status to its meetings that will restrict the participation of NGOs and farmer communities, especially their biggest and more important organization worldwide, La Via Campesina. The UPOV Convention has over the years been systematically changed to increasingly favor formal plant breeders, endowing them with rights that are far stronger than those of farmers, warned the Third World Network (TWN).
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