Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 165 - April 25, 2014

The participants in the civil society strategy meeting on monitoring and accountability organized by Social Watch last february in Montevideo were asked about how they personally work and relate with the huge task of making the powerful accountable. Here is what they said:

Ziad Abdel Samad

Social Watch contributed a lot mainly on the role of monitoring of the public policies and advocacy targeting the national and international actors. This is one of the main roles that contribute to change the attitude, the role and the perspective of CSOs in the region that allow to be able and to follow of what is happening in the region because we are in the middle of this transition period that we are experiencing now in the region. See the video here.

Wolfgang Obenland

Tax justice, tax evasion around the world because is a cause for the governments to have all the revenues they need to provide all the goods, the social services they should provide. There are hundreds of billions of dollars that flow from countries in the South to countries in the North.

See the video here.

See all the videos here. More coming soon.

Speaking at a  recent United Nations financing for development meeting, human rights organizations argued human rights should inform commitments to finance the new development agenda.
The High Level Dialogue of ECOSOC with the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Trade Organization and UNCTAD is held every year and it is one of the follow up tracks for the Financing for Development Conference. This year’s edition, held on April 14-15, 2014, took place at a significant juncture. Governments are deliberating on the features of a new generation of development goals that, as part of the “post-2015 development agenda,” will replace the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. Commitments to financing the new goals are expected to play an important role in those negotiations. At the same time, governments are in negotiations to define when the Third International Conference on Financing for Development will be held. Read more

Ten CSOs are conducting their activities in accordance with the International Standards for domestic election monitoring. In order to support the conduct of free and fair Iraqi Parliamentary and IKR Provincial Councils elections on April 30, 2014, ten Iraqi CSOs from ten di?erent governorates came together to form an informal alliance acting in accordance with the “Declaration of Global Principles for Nonpartisan Election Observation and Monitoring by Citizen Organizations”. Read more