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February 5, 2010
US NGO slams Canada for inaction on Honduras
Repeatedly, COHA specialists have called upon Canadian authorities to use their nation’s positive image throughout this hemisphere to help build authentic democratic institutions and condemn human rights violations wherever they might occur in the region. Regrettably, innovation and a creative marque have rarely characterized Ottawa’s regional policy, but Canada’s role toward Latin America has seldom been as inert and shallow as it has been under its present minority government and Minister Kent. On his just-concluded trip to Honduras, Kent almost seemed to go out of his way to buy into a formula on Honduras that would all but guarantee that Manuel Zelaya, the constitutional president of the country who was ousted at gunpoint by a military coup on June 28, would remain in exile. New elections will be held at the end of this November.
Under Kent’s laconic leadership, Ottawa even managed to drag its feet over canceling the golpista Honduran government’s diplomatic visas, a step that every government in the EU and in this hemisphere, even including the U.S., has managed to take. In effect, what Kent has done is to go beyond his government’s usual minimal level of activity when it came to regional affairs. He also has, in effect, sanctioned, by going along with U.S. State Department mythology, that somehow the murky line that the two countries are advocating will get Zelaya restored to office.
Kent has provided no leadership whatsoever during his trip to Honduras, and he does neither his country nor the hemisphere much credit in confirming, once again, that when it comes to Latin American issues, Ottawa is bereft of an ability to come forth with an independent and innovative policy.
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February 3, 2010
Debate Over Canada’s Bill C-300 Rages On: An Effectual Step Forward Or Another Toothless Regulation?
Liberal Member of Parliament John McKay has put forth Bill C-300, an initiative which would give the Canadian federal government the ability to investigate allegations of human rights and environmental violations levied against mining companies. If found guilty of violating federal standards, a company would face economic repercussions in the form of federal government funding cuts.
While many human rights activists cite the bill as an invaluable step forward in the incremental struggle for legal reform, others contend that C-300 would do little to restructure the fundamental inequalities that privilege the economic rights of corporations over the individual and community rights of citizens.
Find out more about Bill C-300 and the debate surrounding it.
February 3, 2010
Amnesty International Issues Human Rights Recommendations to Honduran President Porfirio Lobo
Amnesty International recently released a set of recommendations geared towards reconstructing Honduras’ human rights record since the deterioration of rule of law in the country following the June 2009 coup d’état.
Click here for more information on human rights abuses in Honduras and to read Amnesty’s recommendations.
February 3, 2010
Eye on Ottawa The Better Aid Bill – Has it Changed Anything?
In an effort to ensure that Canada’s foreign aid will be well spent, the Official Development Assistance (ODA) Accountability Act was introduced to Parliament in May 2006. In 2008 it passed the third reading and became law, but John MacKay, the Liberal MP who introduced the bill, is not convinced it is being implemented eff ectively. “The government has made it clear that it is going to pay lip service to this bill. T is puts the government in confrontation with the unanimous will of parliament,” he said. The Act lays out three criteria for ODA: that it contribute to poverty reduction, take into account the perspectives of the poor, and be consistent with Canada’s human rights obligations.
10% of ODA goes directly to the World Bank, and there are questions about whether this funding meets the human rights obligations of the new law. The World Bank has no formal human rights standards, and has been criticized for not taking potential rights abuse into account in project planning. These offenses include:
- a state-led massacre of indigenous residents in rural Guatemala who refused to abandon their land to allow for the construction of a World-Bank funded dam in 1978;
- the funding of a pipeline project in Chad and Cameroon in 1997 and 1998 where governments routinely violated human rights; and most recently, and
- the funding of Glamis Gold’s Marlin Mine in Guatemala in 2002, which local groups say harmed the community through lack of consultation, sparking conflict and violence.
The World Bank says it informally supports human rights, but that rights are political issues beyond its economic mandate. To ensure its projects comply with the Bank’s standards, the Bank created an Inspection Panel in 1994 to provide a forum for people who believe they will be or are currently being aversely affected by a Bank project. Some people have used it to address human rights issues but it has been critiqued by NGOs for lacking authority, as it can only make recommendations to Bank management.
There have been cases in the past where an Inspection Panel recommendation has resulted in the cancellation of a project. T is occurred at the Arun III Hydroelectric Project in Nepal in 1994 over concerns of environmental degradation and resettlement of local residents.
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February 2, 2010
Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom Up
Moving Out of Poverty is an engaging read and will be of interest to the academic, the development practitioner, the policy maker and indeed anyone who has an interest in the poverty eradication and economic development effort.
The book’s observations and findings are based on first hand narratives and life stories as told by more than 60,000 people, from 500 communities across 21 regions in 15 countries – a truly massive undertaking. It provides an inside look at the lives of the poor, the near poor and even the not so poor. It identifies, from their varied perspectives, the challenges, constraints and obstacles to moving out of poverty and the sometimes more challenging task of staying out of poverty. It effectively consolidates these stories into discussions around the determinants of poverty and what is important at the individual and household level in the fight to reduce poverty.
Regardless of one’s experience in economics, development, sociology or other social science, the book is certain to change one’s views about the nature of poverty. By starting at the ground floor, in talking to thousands and thousands of people, a level of clarity and insight into the condition of poverty is achieved that has rarely been attained elsewhere. And the authors emphasize that poverty is a condition. Troughout the book, the poor themselves are clear in describing poverty as a condition that they temporarily find themselves in; it is not perceived as permanent, or something that defines them. One is not a “poor person”, one is simply presently experiencing poverty.
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February 1, 2010
Eye on the Word Bank and the IMF
I arrive in Washington at noon, depressed as I consider the fi nancial crisis and what it will mean for people in impoverished countries. It’s time for the main policy meetings of the World Bank and IMF, and NGOs like me take part in some of the dozens of meetings that are planned. I take the metro from the airport to the guesthouse to drop off my bag, and within an hour I’m at my first session, on gender and income. It’s not a hopeful start. Money from production goes increasingly to corporate profit, and less to wages, and the fi nancial bailouts are reinforcing inequalities.
Next up is a session on “Broad Community Support” at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank division that funds private sector projects. The talk about community support comes down to the tension between “consultation” (required by IFC) and “consent” (not required).
There is a gradual shift by companies and the IFC to seeking “consent” of people aff ected by a project, but there are problems. Most countries don’t have adequate standards of consultation let alone consent, the IFC staff determine how a community is to be consulted rather than the community itself, the IFC doesn’t know how to gauge consent, and communities are usually divided on support or opposition to a project. Despite all the rationalizing about why the World Bank doesn’t do better, the talk is all about rights and empowerment and it’s lifted my mood considerably. Until recently the World Bank didn’t engage in this kind of talk at all.
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January 28, 2010
Landgrabbing and forced evictions in Cambodia “Development that impoverishes”?
For some, June 6th 2006 (6-6-6) was believed to announce the apocalypse. And although humanity did not indeed come to an end that morning, the world did collapse for more than a thousand families of the Sambok Chap community, in Phnom Penh. Their houses were destroyed, and the villagers crowded into trucks and relocated to Andung, almost 30 kilometres outsides the capital.
This was the start of the largest displacement of people since the Khmer Rouge, in the north-western end of the city around Boeung Kak lake.Sambok Chap residents previously enjoyed a life in the city, running small businesses and shops close to adequate resources and local markets. Now, more than three years since the eviction, most of them live in deplorable conditions, without access to clean water and sanitation.
Dr. Rapho, formerly a medical officer in refugee camps following the Khmer Rouge period, is part of a medical team of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) that visits Andung twice a week. Asked if Andung could be compared to a refugee camp, he said that, lacking UN and other international support, it was worse. “There is no water, no rice, no medical support, no school, nothing. Conditions are impossible for human life.”
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January 28, 2010
Second class in Hong Kong
Roxanne Sonas had hopes of a bed during her stay with the family that employed her, but she slept on the floor. Her employer promised her that a bed would arrive when they changed apartments. “On the day we moved in, they had IKEA deliver a cabinet,” the 33-year-old Filipino domestic helper said, her eyes filling with tears. “It was horrible.” Sonas slept on top of the cabinet, without a pillow or blanket, in the living room of her employer’s home in Hong Kong’s trendy Causeway Bay neighborhood for five months, while she worked up to 22 hours a day, six days a week.
“Luckily it was summer so it wasn’t cold,” Sonas said. “I was very afraid. I was always crying.” After an arduous process involving the police and the Hong Kong labor department, she was eventually able to quit. There are laws to protect foreign domestic help-ers living in Hong Kong, most originally from the Philippines, but enforcement is not easy. Helpers that have signed contracts dating after July 2008 must be paid at least $3,850 HKD ($545 CAD) per month.
They are also entitled to one rest day per week, to be fed or receive a food allowance, and depending on their years of service, and receive between seven and 14 days of vacation time annually. Despite the laws, at least 15 percent of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are underpaid. Approximately 27 percent are verbally and physically abused and 22 percent do not receive weekly days off.
Helpers for Domestic Helpers (HDH) is an organization that provides free paralegal advice and counseling to domestic helpers in Hong Kong. The workers come from several countries, the majority from the Philippines but increasingly from Indonesia. 95 percent of Indonesian domestic helpers that come to HDH for advice report being underpaid, with only one or two days off per month. In addition, when a contract is terminated, foreign domestic helpers have only two weeks to find other arrangements or they must leave Hong Kong. This leaves little time to deal with grievances or collect owed wages, and deters abused workers from leaving their jobs. Many workers are placed by an agency. The maximum commission an employment agency may collect from a foreign domestic helper is no more than ten percent of the helper’s first month’s wages. In reality, however, many employment agencies impose substantial placement fees on helpers for months after they have arrived in Hong Kong. Sonas, for instance, paid nearly 90 percent of her monthly wages to an employment agency for three months, keeping only $500 HKD ($70 CAD) for herself each month.
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January 27, 2010
Financial vultures
In 1979, Romania loaned Zambia $15 million to put toward agricultural machinery and vehicles. By the 1990s due to widespread poverty and devastating health conditions, Zambia was unable to repay its external debt and started to negotiate for debt cancellation.
During this negotiation, in 1999, a company named Donegal International bought up Zambia’s debt, then valued at $30 million, for $3.3 million. Donegal then sued Zambia for the full amount of the debt, plus interest – a total of $55 million Donegal has been called a “vulture fund,” which designates a company that buys up “bad” debt at a discount and then sues for the full amount plus interest. These funds carry out most of their activities through legal action in national courts and usually win.
Donegal International was started in 1997 with the sole purpose of holding and managing the debt purchased by Romania and owned by Zambia. Companies like Donegal International are often set up to pursue a single debt and then are shut down as soon as they win their lawsuit. This technique allows them to be as secretive about their actions as possible, often going unnoticed due to their lack of publicity.
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