Global Seminars
Opening session
Human Dignity and Human Rights: Measures of a just world
Conveners: HDHRC
The opening session will elaborate the role of human rights in everyday struggles of people for dignity, freedom, justice, peace, equality, diversity and their entitlement to a social and
international order in which such universal values can be fully realized.
Human rights and struggles for social and economic justice
Conveners:
Dignity International, Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC),
Equalinrights and Building Eastern Africa Community Network (BEACON).
On the right to development: the UN General Assembly established in 1986 that the right to development is an inalienable human right
that implies full respect and realization of all human rights, while ensuring that States have full sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources, through the cooperation of all, and in
particular of developed countries, in order to achieve a new international economic order. However, far from progressing in this direction, the disparity between the North and the South, between
rich and poor, continues to increase. Transnational corporations very often dictate public policies, the free-market model asserts itself as the model for « growth », services are liberalized,
including those services that are essential for the general well-being, and regulations are adopted to favor businesses, very often in contradiction with States' obligations to protect the
environment as well as economic, social and cultural rights.
How to prevent impunity for the grave and persistent violations of economic, social and cultural rights of the majority of the world's population? How to fight against and overcome impunity for
environmental crimes committed daily, for the ethnocide to which many indigenous communities are doomed? How to ensure that the natural wealth and resources of the peoples are not expropriated by
elites or for the interests of transnationals?
Human rights and struggles for gender equity
Convener: Interchurch Organization for development Cooperation (ICCO), Eastern African Coalition on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (EACOR) and Equalinrights.
A multimedia thematic seminar that will apply the concept of structural violence to define key challenges to achieving gender equity and provide a framework for analyzing and confronting
them.
This thematic seminar will define key challenges to achieving gender equity and provide a framework for analyzing and confronting them. It
is conceptualized as a multimedia tribunal-type event that will run approximately three hours. Rather than judges, a panel of experts will hear two cases of structural violence against women: one
focused on social and economic exclusion and the other on sexual gender-based violence. Rather than judgments, a panel of three experts will offer legal, political, institutional, economic,
social, cultural and grassroots perspectives on the violations and strategies for confronting them. Seminar participants will be invited share their experiences as well.
Rather than a legalistic, courtroom feel that other mock tribunals have cultivated, this seminar will have a colorful and interactive
atmosphere. Participants, particularly those presenting the two cases, will be encouraged to use theatre or role-play, music, video and other visuals in making their presentations. This lively
atmosphere will attract a more diverse audience than would normally attend a major gender-focused event.
Human rights and struggles over habitat, land and environment
Conveners: Habitat International Coalition –
Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN), Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN) and
Settlement Information Network Africa (SINA)
Despite the clarity of international human rights law and the Millennium Development Goal No. 7, official
structures and ideologies of deprivation remain largely in tact, where violent forced evictions are rampant and unsupported rural communities cannot survive on their lands. Women everywhere
remain institutionally excluded from land and housing tenure, urban migration is overburdening cities, foreign occupation dispossesses entire peoples, and large-scale “development” projects
deprive and displace millions, while economic and spatial apartheid increasingly is becoming the norm.
Through testimonies and performances, this seminar explores contentious issues, competing interests, common values,
human rights dilemmas and problem-solving strategies of diverse social movements struggling to find solutions and redress for local and global causes of poverty-deepening policies and the squalid
living conditions that result. Their strategies involve opposing evictions, claiming needed lands for livelihood, asserting gender equality, mounting legal defense, engaging in “social production
of habitat,” resisting foreign occupation, and asserting the “human right to land” for the survival of rural, pastoral, tribal and indigenous people(s).
Human rights, mobility and citizenship gap
Conveners: Mazingira Institute and Lutheran World Federation
The seminar will convene individuals and groups concerned with the emergent twin challenge of protection of human rights and amelioration of citizenship gap, in the age of migration and
globalization of mobility of people.
The emergent threats to human rights from transnational migration create a problematic situation, that involves a multitude of migrant workers – legal and illegal
aliens, within and across regions of the world. The correlation between their citizenship rights and social exclusion has become a source of conflict. In this respect, joining the ranks of
migrant workers, are the multitudes of refugees and internally displaced persons who suffer the same fate. The problematic situation also includes people in occupied territories or emergency
zones, and indigenous peoples striving for self-governance, citizenship and collective rights within the states in which they live.
”In many aspects of law and politics, there is a growing tension between global human rights and the social rights of national citizenship. For example, many first-nation peoples, migrant
communities and gay and lesbian couples struggle to realize their cultural rights under human rights legislation, because their social rights cannot be adequately realized within the framework of
citizenship. These social changes represent a major challenge to the traditional framework of citizenship rights.” (Bryan Turner: New Keywords, 2005,
Blackwell Publishing)
The seminar will promote ways to strengthen transnational human rights activism on threats to human rights from mobility of people and citizenship gap.
Human rights and conflict, militarization and culture of impunity
Conveners: Entishar Charitable Society (Sudan) and
Fédération Internationale de Droit de l’Homme (FIDH)
The end of the Cold War did not meant progress towards world peace, although it brought an end to many dictatorships. New conflicts -ethnic, religious, nationalist
or geostrategic- have led to genocidal practices, crimes of lese-humanity, infringements of minimal norms of international humanitarian law and violations of the most basic principles of the UN
Charter, all of which caused millions of victims. The struggle against terrorism is moving ahead in such a way that its consequences are inversely proportional to the expected results. However,
at the same time, there has been progress in the fight against impunity; the UN International Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have been established, leading to the creation of the
International Criminal Court (ICC) already ratified by one hundred countries. There has also been progress in terms of universal jurisdiction, which concretely means that all the Pinochets, the
Taylors, the Habrés now know very well that they can no longer be sure to enjoy their immunity for the crimes they have committed. Such steps forward can boost changes at local level in terms of
repression, reparation and deterrence. But are the breakthroughs in the fight against impunity definite, or can there be setbacks ? What lessons can we draw from these experiences? To answer
these questions and reinforce our struggles, the Human Rights Caucus of the WSF encourages you to join efforts within this perspective.
Human rights and faith and cultural diversity
Conveners: HDHRC and Ecumenical Platform
The people of the world today face the challenge of accepting that other people are different,
and that however different they maybe, they are all equal in their human rights and dignity. Thus, the need to embrace tolerance and unity among the people of the world, living in the so-called
global village, cannot be over-emphasized. The call for tolerance and respect for diversity needs to be strengthened when, as now, themes such as terrorism, conflicts and wars, and poverty, are
polarizing communities along religious and/or cultural lines.
How can local, national, regional and global social movements uphold the dignity and human rights of all people irrespective of their
religions and cultures?
This issue also touches the need to reconcile some cultural and religious practices with respect
for the human dignity of all. The human rights framework, established to protect human dignity, can provide strong analytical guidance here. On the other hand, we must ensure that human rights
strategies work from rather than break down cultural and religious values and practices. Finally, there is a need to engage on how these three areas: religion, human rights and culture can work
together to provide clear common direction to support societies in the challenges they face.
