Human Rights-Based Approaches and EU Development Aid Policies October 29, 2009

“Despite increased use of human rights language, a range of key EU development policies do not coherently or consistently reflect the applicable international human rights framework. Weaknesses include substitution of legally precise human rights terminology with vague formulations of language; misrepresenting the relationship between policy commitments such as the Millennium Development Goals and the legal obligations of human rights; failure to identify core development challenges, such as poverty as a denial of human rights, or to acknowledge the equal status of economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights.”  (IHRN)

This briefing paper is the result of a joint initiative by Terre des Hommes International Federation, Action Aid International, Amnesty International EU Office and International Human Rights Network (IHRN). These four organisations have jointly funded the initiative, with this paper being researched and written by IHRN.

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Blessed Unrest! October 14, 2009

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world’s fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity’s collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.

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Responsibility to protect: translating ideas into capacity by Douglas Wilson July 30, 2009

Nicolas Rost/UNHCR

In 2005, the World Summit endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, which reconceives of state sovereignty as the responsibility to protect citizens from human rights atrocities, and most controversially, endorses international intervention as a last resort if states fail or refuse to comply with that responsibility.

However, implementation is proving more problematic, with sceptics in the developing world viewing R2P as an inadvertent incitement to armed uprising at best, or a “Trojan Horse” of Western imperialism at worst. Moreover, there is widespread feeling that some countries are resiling from previous commitments made in this regard.

On 9-10 March 2009, the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior (FRIDE) and Intermón Oxfam, with the cooperation of the Canadian and British Embassies in Spain, brought together a number of experts to discuss R2P and its implementation, what can be done to facilitate that process, what obstacles it faces, and what R2P’s prospects are as an international norm of the future.

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TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND DEVELOPMENT: MAKING CONNECTIONS, Edited by Pablo de Greiff and Roger Duthie July 22, 2009

Developing societies emerging from conflict and authoritarianism are frequently beset by poverty, inequality, weak institutions and insecurity. The same countries are also often the scene of massive human rights violations, which leave in their wake victims who are marginalized – people who have strong claims to justice. Yet those who work to address the interconnected concerns of development and justice do not always work together to provide coherent responses to the needs of transitional societies.

Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections examines the relationship between two fields that, academically and in practice, have proceeded largely isolated from one another. The book is the result of an ICTJ research project that brought together a diverse group of experts and practitioners to improve the dialogue between transitional justice and development and to explore ways of maximizing the synergies between the two fields. It is accompanied by a series of Research Briefs highlighting the most important findings of each of the book’s chapters.

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND DEVELOPMENT: MAKING CONNECTIONS

The 2009 Failed States Index | Foreign Policy July 15, 2009

The 2009 Failed States Index | Foreign Policy

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Oxfam activists pose as ancient Romans in masks of G8 heads of state in Rome July 8, 2009

Two million people live in a human rights black hole in the slums of Nairobi June 24, 2009

Amnesty International released its report on Friday, into the dire conditions and gross human rights abuses endured in Nairobi’s informal settlements. The Unseen Majority: Nairobi’s Two Million Slum Dwellers describes how half of Nairobi’s population live in informal settlements, but are crammed into only 5 per cent of the city’s residential area and just 1 per cent of all land in the city.

The report is the first launched under the organization’s groundbreaking new global campaign, Demand Dignity, which aims to expose and combat the human rights abuses that make and keep people poor…

Click here for detail of AI report