Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 145 - September 13, 2013

Issue 145 - September 13, 2013
 

Social Watch Philippines marches against “pork barrel”

Thousands march against pork
barrels. (Photo VoA)

“The abolition of the pork barrel system should be total” said Leonor Briones, lead convenor Social Watch Philippines, to a Congressional committee in Manila, bringing to legislators the message that hundreds of thousands of people had reaffirmed in the streets during marches against corruption in the previous days.

“Pork barrel” is the popular name of a system that allows members of parliament the direct allocation of budget funds to pet projects in their constituencies. Some “pork barrel amount to the equivalent of four million dollars a year.

The president himself manages a “pork barrel fund” of some 500 million dollars and several items of the Special Purpose Funds (SPF) in the national budget for 2014. “SPFs breed corruption. How can Congress scrutinize the SPF when there is no detail? It is just one chart in the budget documents and one line in the summary papers,” SWP said Briones.

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Photo: Ministry of Labor and
Social Security (Uruguay).

The open panel on "Progress and Challenges on Tax Justice and Social Justice in Uruguay", put together by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Center of Concern, Social Watch and the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) - all members of the Righting Finance Initiative - together with the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) took place on Friday, August 16, 2013.

Eduardo Brenta, Labour and Social Security Minister and Pablo Ferreri, Director of the Directorate-General for Taxation (DGI) discussed the impact of Uruguay tax and labor polices in terms of redistribution and the future challenges together with academics, feminist and human rights activists.

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The long awaited work of an experts' committee on sustainable development financing, a key outcome of the Rio+20 United Nations conference, has finally started.

The Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing held its first session on 28-30 August at the UN headquarters in New York.

However, contrary to most multilateral discussions and intergovernmental processes in the UN, the session was closed not only to external stakeholders but also the Member States that are not part of the Committee membership of 30 states.

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“Despite the global progress with regards to literacy, disadvantaged populations and individuals are still excluded from quality learning provision” concludes the Global Report for Adult Learning and Education. The report, titled “Rethinking Literacy” was launched in Amman, Jordania on 8th September 2013 and it places a special focus on adult literacy as a foundation for adult learning and education, in addition to other topics such as promoting, financing and conducting quality assurance for adult education programmes and strategies.

Carolyn Medel-Anonuevo, from UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning pointed out that "literacy courses are only the first step to lifelong learning and that they should prepare people for future learning by encouraging skills to critically analyse information and take decisions.".

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The human rights impacts of fiscal and tax policy will be the subject of an upcoming report by the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty. The report, to be presented in June of next year (at the 26th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council) comes on the throes of growing scrutiny of economic policies by human rights advocates and will likely be welcome not just by them, but also by organizations that work on tax justice and revenue transparency issues and will draw reassurance from seeing their concern become a human rights issue.

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Members and partners of the Asia Development Alliance (ADA) composed of national and sub-national development CSO/NGO platforms in Asia, participating in the 2nd Regional Consultation on Post-2015 development agenda in Bangkok, Thailand on 25 August 2013.

 

Read the statement that recognized the importance of the Post 2015 Development Agenda as an opportunity and challenge to CSOs in Asia to empower people living in poverty and insecurity to claim their own rights.

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SOCIAL WATCH IS AN INTERNATIONAL NGO WATCHDOG NETWORK MONITORING POVERTY ERADICATION AND GENDER EQUALITY
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