Equalinfo Issue July - September 2010

In this issue 

1. Conference on Human Rights and Conflict in honour of Equalinrights’ Chair
2. Launch of Equalonline - the Equalinrights Resource Centre
3. The People’s Budget – Shelter Forum
4. Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) Global Assembly
5. Announcements
6. Forthcoming Events
7. Resources
8. Staff News

To mark the retirement of Prof. Bas de Gaay Fortman as Chair in Political Economy of Human Rights at Utrecht University, the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) hosted a two-day Conference on Human Rights and Conflict from 9 – 10 September 2010.

Professor de Gaay Fortman, currently Chair of Equalinrights, delivered his valedictory address on the 10th of September 2010 at the Dom Church in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The valedictory lecture entitled Minority Rights: A Major Misconception highlights the failure of International legal mechanisms to protect the rights of minorities and questions the very notion of ‘minority rights’ given the absence of consistently reliable legal methodology for limiting or even defining the composition of groups. This lecture is due to be published in the Human Rights Quarterly journal. Glowing tributes were paid to Prof de Gaay Fortman’s long and distinguished academic career as well as to his outstanding qualities as teacher, mentor, human rights defender, politician and member of the intelligentsia.

Emma Sydenham, Equalinrights, spoke at the conference on tapping the transformative potential of human rights education (HRE). She touched on a number of key principles of emerging good practice for a more transformative model of HRE, which have demonstrated powerful potential to facilitate social change, including in fragile and post-conflict states. Factors which play a significant role in cultivating transformation centre around critical reflection and engaging unequal power relationships and structures. She made some suggestions for carving new space for transformation were shared, namely: building more dialogical spaces for common understanding across persistent boundaries and hierarchies; working with all stakeholders and committing to processes that accept the long term nature of change; collectively interrogating who systems serve and why; building coalitions prepared to stand against systems and institutions trying to influence practice in ways which are in conflict with human rights principles; and investing more energy in trailing new ways of doing things that upend outdated norms of power.

Equalinrights proudly announces the launch of Equalonline - an online resource centre aspiring to be a thematic one-stop-shop for free e-resources related to Human Rights-Based Development (HRBD).  The aim of this open-access information storage and retrieval database is to promote knowledge and resource sharing and mutual learning. Materials that can be accessed from this database are predominantly in the public domain or have a Creative Commons Licence and efforts have been made to provide full attribution wherever possible.

If you would like to add to this database, please get in touch with the Equalinrights’ Communications Officer.

Equalinrights works with partners to develop tools and experience-based concepts on human rights policies and budgets. Shelter Forum is one such pioneering partner working in Kenya, since 2007, to ensure that the right to housing is concretely fulfilled, and to influence the Kenyan budget process through the “People’s Budget”.

The People’s budget aims to capture development needs as prioritised by communities, identified through community consultation of various groups (women, youth, people with disabilities, men). The consultations aim to identify specific development priorities for the allocation of financial resources, thereby showing how the community sees its development needs and challenges. Furthermore, through the process, participants are sensitised into looking at their development needs as rights. The identified needs are subsequently budgeted for using a practical calculation of daily living expenses.  The people’s budget thus effectively identified the Kenyan poverty-line using the cost of maize meal and basic foodstuffs, showing how ordinary people cannot be expected to live on one dollar a day and still have a dignified life.

To raise awareness of the identified development priorities, different advocacy strategies are employed, including an “official” People’s Budget launch with substantial media coverage (television, radio and newspapers) with community members and civil society. To ensure media interest, influential personalities such as members of parliament are invited to participate. For example, in 2009, a member of parliament was persuaded to put forward the people’s budget in parliament and present it to the Minister of Finance.

In future, Shelter Forum aims to incorporate ‘Frontloading’ into the People’s Budget process. This will help make a stronger budgeting case to the Minister of Finance by depicting the situation as it is, costing the rights and monitoring their realisation.

Article submitted by Eric Makokha - Chief Executive Officer, Shelter Forum

GCAP’s Global Assembly 2010 took place in New York City on 23-25 September 2010 marking the sixth year of GCAP’s existence and paralleling the Millennium Development Goals Review Summit at the United Nations.  

The GCAP Global Assembly provided the opportunity to reflect on GCAP’s effort to build a global movement that ensures that poverty and inequality do not fall off the governance agenda both globally and in the 130+ GCAP member countries. It also provided the occasion to share and discuss GCAP’s efforts to improve public accountability as well as the space and credibility of civil society efforts across regions. Equalinrights attended the GA to support the urgent need for increased and stronger links between the MDG agenda to the human rights framework. As pointed out by Colm Ó Cuanacháin, Amnesty International’s Senior Director: 

“The outcomes of this Summit do not reflect the human rights obligations of states in areas such as housing or health. Despite the focus on accountability in discussions no specific mechanisms to monitor states were agreed.  Indigenous people and other discriminated groups are all more ignored.” 

Resonating with Ó Cuanacháin’s argument, Equalinrights, together with Ashok Kumar Bharti, Chairman of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR) and the GCAP Secretariat, committed to setting up and further developing GCAP’s Taskforce on Social Exclusion. The Taskforce will bring together representatives from socially excluded groups and other stakeholders to address the interlinkages of social exclusion, poverty and human rights and ensure their continued presence on the global governance agenda. A further expansion of the taskforce will take place in the coming months. As a result of two successful meetings of the taskforce held prior to the GCAP’s Global Assembly to discuss their call to action, their message was incorporated into GCAP’s ‘World We Want’ press statement which was issued as a response to the outcome of the MDG Summit:

“Support for all international development programmes and MDGs should make explicit reference to human rights and social exclusion based on caste, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, age, social and economic status,  health status, disability,  and sexual orientation  so that the socially excluded have inherent stake and fully benefit from the international commitments  to development including the  realization of the MDGs and human rights.
Build capacity at the national level for inclusive development planning so that issues affecting the socially excluded are an integral part of national plans, reports and tools designed to contribute to the full realization of the MDGs and human rights.   Ensure adequate disaggregated data collection and monitoring of progress of the socially excluded is part of MDG planning processes at both the country and global level to hold governments and the international community accountable to their commitments toward the socially excluded and enable required corrective measures and redress.”

1-10 December 2010, Malaysia: 9th Annual Global Linking & Learning Programme, Human Rights-Based Development. For the ninth consecutive year, Dignity International is proud to invite applications to the Annual Global Linking and Learning Programme. This programme will build on the successes of the previous learning programmes on “Human Rights-Based Development”, and on “Economic Social and Cultural Rights” organised by Dignity International with a range of national, regional and international partners.

For details about programme content, participation criteria, application procedures, financial and practical information, please visit the Dignity International website.
Application Deadline: 20 October 2010.

Tactical Tech’s Visualising Women's Rights in the Arab World Workshop, Jordan, December 2010. Those interested can look at the call for applications to the workshop and the project.  Scholarships are available for those working on issues related to women's rights in Palestine, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. If you are working in another country in the Arab world and would like to attend, details are available here.
Application deadline: 14 October 2010