| The outcome of three upcoming global UN Conferences will determine the future of humanity and the environment over the next decades. The UN Secretary-General has called for ‘transformative action’, recognizing that the current growth-centered model of development is bankrupt and must be replaced by a peoples-and-planet–centered model that ensures people’s human rights and is in harmony with mother earth.In light of the importance of the three Conferences and the inter-linked nature of their themes, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) is exhorting that the opportunity not be lost for developing a domestic dialogue around these important priorities.The first Financing for Development (FfD) Conference, set for tomorrow in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,Wholesale Authentic NHL Jerseys, aims to raise funding for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Post-2015 programme, which is the subject of the second UN Conference in September in New York. The third ‘COP21’ Conference in December in Paris will seek a global consensus to slow global warming.However, without extra-ordinary global pressure, the political momentum required to embrace this agenda will not prevail against the vested interests of those who dominate and benefit from extraction-driven growth strategies.Despite the lofty rhetoric, success in these conferences can each be measured by one key yardstick. In the case of the Addis Ababa Conference that yardstick will be whether the Conference adopts a resolution to reduce commercial money-laundering by 50 per cent over the next fifteen years. If adopted and implemented, this resolution would render available to government the enormous sums of money illegally transferred out of developing countries by business and industry in order to eliminate poverty.Were Guyana,Buy Cheap Jerseys, for example, to have available even 50 per cent of the estimated US$273 million, annually, siphoned off by crooked business in collusion with corrupt government officials, the education, health, housing and welfare needs of the society could be eradicated without external aid.The key yardstick for success in the September Conference on SDGs will be a clear, unequivocal commitment to poverty eradication. A radical rights-based development strategy is the only way to achieve this goal. At present the Sustainable Development Agenda Post-2015 – 2030 contains neither the goal nor the strategy commitments. Indeed, despite the seductive ‘transformative’ language, the official conference Document is overly deferential to the dominant economic powers and their growth-based philosophy.The fifteen-year time-frame envisaged by the UN for these Conferences to abolish poverty in the SDG programme is unacceptable and should be understood as postponing the commitment for another fifteen years.The UN must accept responsibility for fostering the impression that a 15-year completion period is reasonable, when in fact it is a time-frame with which governments and globalizers are comfortable. We should not overlook the fact that despite the decade or more assigned to achieving the Millennium Goals results were mediocre. The UN has to stop the practice of comparing poverty indicators now with the situation years ago, suggesting success rather than confront the failure to eradicate poverty.The real comparison should be whether we have the resources to eradicate poverty now as a matter of justice, and the answer is ‘yes’. Currently half of all commercially produced food is wasted in order to sustain prices. Financing for development is dwarfed by the illegal outflow of funds from developing countries.These and other statistics point to the lack of political will, not resources, as the main obstacle to poverty eradication. Political will is required to change the priorities and put poverty-elimination on the front-burner. Were such a commitment available, no moral or economic argument would remain for an unequivocal commitment to abolition of poverty, now.For this vision to be realized, it is essential that a rights-based strategy be adopted for the SDG programme. Such an approach will foster social, political and economic processes that effectively preserve, restore or create the environmental,Cheap Jerseys Tag, social,Cheap MLB Jerseys, and economic conditions necessary for all persons, including future generations,NBA Jerseys China, to fully enjoy their civil, political, economic, social,Cheap NFL Jerseys, and cultural rights.However, the draft text of the SDG Conference contains a weak and aspirational, rather than substantive, commitment calling for the SDGs to be “guided by” human rights principles. What is required is an operational agenda, rooted in substantive human rights obligations that effectively become an integral part of striving towards sustainable development. Without time-bound obligations, the proposed human rights goals, targets, standards and framework remain meaningless.“Mainstreaming” human rights in the proposed SDGs is a device that effectively renders them invisible. Calling for human rights to be central to the new agenda cannot be satisfied by language that is left open to interpretation.The yardstick for the ‘COP 21’ Conference on the environment will be ensuring that global warming does not breach the two degree centigrade threshold, a commitment the world in general, but particularly the developed world, has been evading for the past 20 COP conferences.The GHRA is currently concerned that the vital importance of these three Conferences for human and planet-centred development is not attracting the public information and awareness priority that is required.The GHRA is calling on the Government of Guyana and interested civic agencies to seize the opportunity presented by this sequence of crucial Conferences to re-assess domestic activities with respect to rights-based, people-and-planet-centered development. (Guyana Human Rights Association) |
