A child holds a sign at a rally for immigration reform. Credit: Progress Ohio/cc by 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 29 2014 (IPS)

Rights advocates and lawmakers are expressing increased concern over the United States’ handling of the sudden influx of tens of thousands of undocumented child and female migrants from Central America.

Last week, President Barack Obama announced that military bases would be converted to detention centres to house the nearly 50,000 unaccompanied minors that have arrived at the southern U.S. border in recent months. Recent data says some 3,000 are being apprehended daily, though the reasons for their arrival remain debated.

Meanwhile, sentiment is building against the plan, with some suggesting the detention centres could violate international rights obligations.

“We’re very disturbed to hear that the Obama administration plans to open more family detention centre spots, starting with a large facility in New Mexico,” Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“There’s evidence that detaining children causes severe and sometimes lasting harm, including depression, anxiety and cognitive damage. That’s why detaining children for their immigration status is banned under international law.”

Friday morning the Artesia Detention Centre in New Mexico began housing families, mostly women with children, with plans to deport them within two weeks.

In 2009, fewer than 20,000 minors were apprehended in the United States on immigration charges. Yet between October 2013 and May, there have been more than 47,000 apprehensions, more than a 50 percent increase.

Following the marked increase of children with refugee concerns, the United Nations has interviewed more than 400 children on their experiences in their home countries. Nearly 60 percent reportedly meet the requirements for international protection, in what the U.N. called a conservative estimate.

“We heard stories of children watching classmates tortured, dismembered, threats against girls,” Leslie Velez, of the U.N. Refugee Agency, told reporters last week. “This wasn’t just about gangs but criminal armed groups, drug trafficking, cartels, transnational criminal organisations – all operating with greater and greater impunity.”

Detention as deterrence

When a child is apprehended by border patrol, they are typically held at a border patrol station and, within 72 hours, are moved to a federal resettlement office. From there, some 90 percent are released to a sponsor in the U.S., usually a family member, and then must appear before court.

The recent influx, however, means that many kids are now staying at border control offices for more than the 72-hour limit, according to the Inter-American Commission for Human rights (IACHR). Over 100 reports of physical, verbal and sexual abuse by agents towards children have also been filed in a complaint by NGOs against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“We understand that we need to get people away from the border and process them, so we don’t necessarily object to a short-term facility,” Michelle Brane, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“But there’s a lot of talk about ‘stopping the flow,’ to use detention as a deterrence, which we are against … Stopping people’s access to asylum is not in compliance with international refugee law.”

Brane notes that the United States regularly asks countries around the world to uphold international protection standards, with Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan currently accepting millions of Syrian refugees into their much smaller countries. “The numbers here are small in comparison,” she says.

In 2006, Brane visited a family detention centre where she found children who were losing weight, were stressed and could not go outside.

“When we asked children and mothers how they were doing, they broke down … there is no humane way to lock babies in,” she says.

Brane describes community alternatives to detention centres that she calls cheaper and more efficient. Under such programmes, she says, undocumented migrants report to court 96 percent of the time.

Others say that conditions today are not as bad.

“It’s definitely a place where everyone going through feels that it’s not an ideal place for children. But are children’s basic needs being taken care of? Yes, they are,” Juanita Molina, executive director of Border Action Network, a rights group, told IPS about her recent visit to a detention centre in Arizona.

Molina said that many government officials were doing their best to treat the children well, with some facilities now having toys. But she warns that the lack of facilities and staff can defeat even the best-intended workers.

“The federal government needs to reframe how they look at this,” she says, “not as a detention crisis, but as a humanitarian and refugee crisis.”

Both Molina and Brane both voice concerns over the speed with which the government is able to process cases.On Friday, the Obama administration announced it would process cases at Artesia within 10 to 15 days.

“The lack of due process feels irresponsible,” Molina says. “It’s possible that it’s lawful, but it’s not moral.”

Root causes

Meanwhile, immigration specialists argue that the root cause of the issue is violence in Central America – not lenient U.S. immigration policies, as many conservative lawmakers here are claiming.

“This child migration is not a result of failed border security,” Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank here, told IPS.

“It is the result of profound push factors in Central America – violence, instability and lack of economic opportunity – coupled with the consequences, sometimes unintended, of humane, well-meaning U.S. laws, policies and court rulings … and increasingly sophisticated human smuggling networks that have telegraphed to Central Americans that their children can enter the U.S.”

To address violence in Central America, Vice-President Joe Biden announced from Guatemala last week some 254 million dollars in related aid.

“The Obama administration’s response, thus far, hits on some of the immediate and longer-term responses necessary to deal with this significantly increased flow,” Mittelstadt says.

“The various forms of assistance for Central America represent a recognition of the deep factors in the region that are responsible for part of the flow, including endemic poverty, lack of economic opportunity and gang violence.”

Yet she notes that it remains unclear whether the new assistance represents a one-time commitment or a longer-standing pledge.

Also unclear is the effect this crisis will have on legislative attempts to overhaul the United States’ immigration policies.

“I think this crisis underscores the dire need for comprehensive immigration reform,” Human Rights Watch’s Long says.

“Immigration reform would simultaneously address ongoing rights abuses in the immigration system, including family separation and communities living in fear. It would also provide certainty about the law and who is or who is not eligible for legal status.”

The administration of President Barack Obama pledged to massively expand U.S.-protected parts of the southern Pacific Ocean. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

A first-time U.S.-hosted summit on protecting the oceans has resulted in pledges worth some 800 million dollars to be used for conservation efforts.

During the summit, held here in Washington, the administration of President Barack Obama pledged to massively expand U.S.-protected parts of the southern Pacific Ocean. In an effort to strengthen global food security, the president has also announced a major push against illegal fishing and to create a national strategic plan for aquaculture.

“If we drain our resources, we won’t just be squandering one of humanity’s greatest treasures, we’ll be cutting off one of the world’s leading sources of food and economic growth, including for the United States,” President Obama said via video Tuesday morning.

The “Our Ocean” conference, held Monday and Tuesday at the U.S. State Department, brought together ministers, heads of state, as well as civil society and private sector representatives from almost 90 countries. The summit, hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry, focused on overfishing, pollution and ocean acidification, all of which threaten global food security.

In his opening remarks, Kerry noted that ocean conservation constitutes a “great necessity” for food security. “More than three billion people, 50 percent of the people on this planet, in every corner of the world depend on fish as a significant source of protein,” he said.

Proponents hope that many of the solutions being used by U.S. scientists, policymakers and fishermen could serve to help international communities.

“There is increasing demand for seafood with diminished supply … We need to find ways to make seafood sustainable to rich and poor countries alike,” Danielle Nierenberg, the president of FoodTank, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“For instance, oyster harvesters in the Gambia have really depleted the oyster population, but a U.S.-sponsored project has been able to re-establish the oyster beds – by leaving them alone for a while. The same strategy – to step back a bit – worked with lobster fishers in New England.”

Nierenberg predicted that with diminishing wild fish, the future of seafood will be in aquaculture.

“What aquaculture projects need to do now is learn from the mistakes made from crop and livestock agriculture,” she said. “It doesn’t always work – for instance, maize and soybeans create opportunities for pest and disease. Overcrowding animals creates manure.”

*Seafood fraud*

The Obama administration also hopes to jumpstart the United States’ own seafood production capabilities. According to a White House fact sheet, the United States today imports most of its seafood, though highly regulated U.S. aquaculture is widely seen as particularly safe.

Early on in his first administration, President Obama created a new national ocean stewardship policy which also sought to streamline more than 100 U.S. laws governing the oceans and coordinating the country’s approach to these resources.

This week’s actions will further simplify aquaculture production, while aiming to ensure that U.S. aquaculture does not exceed the population size an environment can naturally support.

“The U.S. is really good at innovating, but not at producing, largely because of the amount of regulatory hurdles,” Michael Tlusty, director of research at the New England Aquarium, told IPS. “Roughly 17 different agencies have roles in aquaculture regulation, so streamlining the process will put all of them together at the same table to efficiently provide permits.”

Tlusty also applauded the administration’s announcement to create a comprehensive programme to deter illegal fishing and seafood fraud.

“We can’t turn a switch and fix the ocean – we need lots of different strategies,” Tlusty said. “Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is very important … as is cutting illegal, underreported and underegistered fishing.”

Advocacy groups have likewise applauded the initiatives.

“President Obama’s announcement is a historic step forward in the fight against seafood fraud and illegal fishing worldwide. This initiative is a practical solution to an ugly problem and will forever change the way we think about our seafood,” Beth Lowell, campaign director for Oceana, a watchdog group, said Tuesday.

“Because our seafood travels through an increasingly long, complex and non-transparent supply chain, there are numerous opportunities for seafood fraud to occur and illegally caught fish to enter the U.S. market.”

Oceana points to recent research noting that nearly a third of wild-caught seafood coming into the United States comes from pirate fishing.

The World Wildlife Fund, a major conservation group, called Obama’s announcements “a turning point” for the world’s oceans.

*Breakneck acidification*

Ocean acidification constitutes a particularly broad and worrisome danger to marine life, shellfish production and ocean-based food security, and received prominent attention at this week’s summit. This process has come about particularly from carbon dioxide emissions resulting from air pollution, which changes the delicate acidity level of the oceans.

“The entire ocean is acidifying, and at an incredibly rapid pace … more in the last 15 years than it has in the whole last 50,000 years,” Catherine Novelli, under-secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the U.S State Department, told IPS.

“If you’ve ever had a fish tank, you’ll know that it is an incredibly delicate balance. And once it gets out of balance, things can’t survive.”

Novelli pointed to innovate projects such as one undertaken by the Prince of Monaco, which aims to determine where acidification is taking place and to offer early warning systems for fish farmers.

“It absolutely affects shellfish farmers, as shellfish are very sensitive to these acidity levels,” said Novelli.

“There’s been some pioneering work done off the coast of Oregon, where shellfish farmers have worked with the state government to monitor the acidification. If the acidity level is changing, they can shut off their water intake from the ocean and preserve their shellfish until waves pass and go in a different direction.”

While the conference looked at a variety of short- and medium-term possibilities for monitoring and adapting to such problems, the discussions also recognised that the issue will likely be subsumed under broader climate change negotiations.

New legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress that would make the rights of sexual minorities a foreign policy priority for the United States.

The bill, called the International Human Rights Defense Act, would direct U.S. diplomats to devise a global strategy for preventing and responding to violence against the LGBT community. It would also create a special envoy within the U.S. State Department who would be tasked with coordinating related policies across the U.S. federal government.

“For the United States to hold true to our commitment to defending the human rights of all people around the world, we must stand with the LGBT community in their struggle for recognition and equality everywhere,” Senator Ed Markey, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement.

Currently, having homosexual relations is illegal in 77 countries. In another five countries, simply being identified as a sexual minority is punishable by death.

The issue came into sharp international focus in February, when Uganda made “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by life in prison, enacting a watered-down version of a law first proposed in 2009 despite widespread condemnation by other governments.

“From when the law tabled in 2009 to today, the cases [of people affected] numbers around 100,” Nikki Mawanda, a transgender Uganda LGBT activist, told IPS.

“These cases vary from imprisonment to evictions, death cases … attempted murder, suicide. And right now as I speak there are more than 108 LGBT refugees from Uganda living in Kenya.”

Mawanda spoke during a press call Tuesday sponsored by American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a humanitarian group.

As elsewhere, the new Ugandan law could now be impacting on broader public health. Fear of imprisonment is now reportedly preventing many LGBT people from seeking health services in the country, as anyone providing such services to sexual minorities in Uganda is considered guilty.

“There’s 1.5 million LGBT [people] who are documented to be not accessing retro-viral AIDS treatment,” Mawanda says. “Will they stop going to clinics? Will clinics stop being there?”

Mawanda sought asylum in the United States earlier this year. But he said that doing so is not an option for many others, because procuring a visa often requires family ties and sufficient economic status.

Meanwhile, Washington has taken a hard rhetorical line in response to the Ugandan legislation. But many activists feel there has been little substantive impact.

“The U.S. has taken a comprehensive review of the Uganda-U.S. relationship and aid,” Ruth Messenger, AJWS’s president, said Tuesday. “We support the U.S. government for taking a serious look at this and the results of the review should be released soon by the U.S. Department of State.”

Extreme pressure
Even in countries without repressive laws like Uganda’s, psychological and physical violence against LGBT people continues to take place.

“It might surprise some people to hear about the situation in Thailand, thought of as a friendly haven for gay travellers from all over the world. But society is not accepting of gay and LGBT people,” Sattara ‘Tao’ Hattirat, a lesbian Thai activist, said on Tuesday’s call.

“Despite being in the capital city, from a middle-class family, I was made to feel that my sexuality and identity are wrong, that I did something wrong in a past life to deserve this.”

Hittirat said that many sexual minorities in Thailand experience “extreme pressure” within their families, with many being forced to marry. Such a situation, she said, leads to high rates of depression and suicide.

Thus far, the Thai LGBT community has received little assistance from the government. Hittarat says there have been no anti-discrimination laws passed, and warns that the state has little understanding of the concept of a hate crime.

“There are incidents [of hate crimes], but the situation is not well documented,” she told IPS. “There are cases of rape of lesbians, butch lesbians in particular, and cases when families chain their children in the house … Many cases exist but are not publicly reflected in numbers.”

Meanwhile, the recent government coup in Bangkok has only made the situation worse.

“It’s destroying democratic processes to the core,” Hittarat say, “making it impossible for human rights, including LGBT rights, to move forward at this point.”

U.S. protections
Meanwhile, the United States has recently stepped up action on domesticLGBT rights, as well. Just this week, President Barack Obama announced his intention to sign an executive order ending discrimination against LGBT workers by federal contractors, seen by advocates as the most significant such move ever taken by a president.

“It’s been estimated that one in five people in the labour force work for a federal contractor, so there will be some people in all 50 states that will have some protection against discrimination from this executive order,” Ian Thompson, a legislative representative with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“In over half the country, there are no explicit state-wide protections against LGBT discrimination. That makes an executive order like this all the more important.”

Still, Thompson says, Obama’s executive order does not do away with the need for the U.S. Congress to pass basic civil rights protections for sexual minorities in the United States. Executive orders, after all, can be undone entirely at the whim of a subsequent president.

A 2011 study by the Williams Institute, at the UCLA School of Law, found that one in four LGBT employees in the United States had reported being discriminated against during the previous half decade.

The study found discrimination against transgender people was even higher. Some 78 percent of transgender respondents reported harassment or mistreatment because of their gender identity, while 47 percent said they had been discriminated against in hiring, promotion or job retention.

This discrimination has significant results. Simply in terms of economics, high rates of poverty and unemployment have been documented among the transgender community.

Even though the U.S. economy is now expected to grow – albeit sluggishly – over the coming two years, inequality will not improve without policy reforms, a major grouping of rich countries is warning.

President Barack Obama has named income inequality the “defining challenge of our time”, and has tried to make the issue a central focus for the remainder of his time in office. That concern is now being backed up by two new reports from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international body of 34 developed countries.“It’s no longer just about inequality but about inequalities – inequality leads to greater polarisation in education and health outcomes.” -- OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria

“Americans have increased working hours by 20 percent but incomes have still fallen. It’s no longer just about inequality but about inequalities – inequality leads to greater polarisation in education and health outcomes,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said at a Washington panel discussion on Jun. 12.

“Inequality was a direct cause of the [2007-08] financial crisis … but contrary to popular thought, there doesn’t need to be a trade-off between growth and inclusivity.”

Gurria in recent months has become a powerful voice on the issue of inequality. During his time in Washington, he also affirmed the gravity of income inequality for the U.S. compared to other developed countries.

The OECD has now released two new reports, Tackling High Inequalities in the U.S. and the OECD’s Economic Survey of the United States. The reports warn that, while there doesn’t necessarily need to be a trade-off between growth an inclusivity, the latter also does not inevitably follow the former.

“Real [gross domestic product] is about six percent above its pre-crisis level, the housing sector is beginning to recover, banks have returned to health,” the reports note, “corporate profitability is high and equity prices have reached new peaks.”

Yet despite these strengthening indicators, income inequality in the U.S. has continued to worsen, with wages for most workers having been slow to bounce back following the economic crisis.

Out of the 34 OECD countries, the U.S. has the fourth-highest inequality, behind Chile, Mexico and Turkey. It is also in third place in terms of the gap between the society’s richest and poorest 10 percent.

While the recession hurt all OECD countries, equality in the U.S has suffered more than in the others.

Between 2000 and 2012, the average disposable income of the bottom 10 percent in the U.S. dropped by some 14 percent. Yet in Canada, the United Kingdom and Switzerland this figure dropped by only half that figure, and by even less in New Zealand and France.

Some observers say the technology and the housing crisis could be two possible reasons that share of income is today more among the rich in the U.S.

“Innovation and the returns to those innovations are concentrated in the U.S. and among people at the top,” Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank here, told IPS. “Also, the recent recession may have made the situation much worse at the bottom in the U.S., where the housing crisis affected many more low-income people who were highly indebted.”

Global models

During his talk in Washington, the OECD’s Gurria offered four recommendations for bolstering inclusive growth in the United States: investing more in human capital, promoting inclusive employment, improving the tax and benefits system, and providing more efficient public services.

Improving education and health services is certainly widely recognised as one way to improve inclusion, but the U.S. experience with related reforms has seen mixed results, particularly given the highly polarised politics that continue to stymie legislative progress in Washington. Obama focused much of his first administration with improving human capital through education legislation, attempts to increase the minimum wage and the highly controversial Affordable Care Act.

Meanwhile, the U.S. spends 25 percent less than OECD countries on policies to connect unemployed citizens to jobs, Gurria noted. Many other rich countries have invested significantly in “activating” their unemployed, or helping match them with jobs that match their skills.

Indeed, certain models do exist across the globe that appear to be able to garner bipartisan support here.

“There are some lessons that we can learn from other countries, such as the use of work-sharing arrangements in Germany that allowed workers to keep their jobs while reducing their hours,” AEI’s Mathur says. “Germany and many other European countries have also done a better job of matching youths to apprenticeship programmes and training programmes.”

In addition to job matching, the U.S. needs more job creation. While the U.S. Senate proudly reports that 9.4 million private sector jobs have been created in the country over the past four-plus years, the OECD and other critics say these include too many low-wage positions.

Of course, not even full employment would fully solve inequality. The OECD credits globalisation, technological change and policy reforms such as lower wage ratios (between the median and minimum) for driving up the wages of the most skilled, especially in information technology or financial sector. Yet these have also left behind low- and middle-skilled workers.

Other countries have offset this difference through redistribution measures like social transfers and lower, progressive tax burdens. In the United States, redistribution measures have reportedly offset two-thirds of the fall in household income brought on by the financial crisis, but this still lags far behind other OECD countries.

“Taxes and transfers readjust inequality by one third in France, but only one fifth in the U.S.,” said Gurria. Yet he also cautions against putting too much faith in tax reforms, warning that “Taxing the rich is an easy way out, but there’s no quick fix.”

AEI’s Mathur agrees that policies must be holistic, targeting not just income inequality but also economic mobility.

“At AEI, we have been doing work looking at consumption inequality, and we find that consumption inequality is much narrower than income inequality,” she says. “This suggests that transfer programmes have to some extent been successful in improving material standards-of-living at the bottom of the income distribution.”

Mathur recently co-authored a study on economic mobility that suggests policies such as expanding school choice to help low-income students graduate high school and helping single mothers by expanding child-care subsidies, among other recommendations.

Most immigrant parents of children like this star soccer player want to be engaged in the lives of their sons and daughters but face obstacles in doing so. Credit: Marcelo Brociner/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

Immigrant parents in the United States face serious challenges accessing early elementary programmes for their children, advocates here are warning.

The centrality of parents in early childhood education is undisputed, yet a new report from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a Washington-based think tank, highlights a broad lack of programming for immigrant parents. The report lists gaps in translation services as well as cultural and systems knowledge for parents as primary obstacles, and notes significant potential impacts on children’s education.

“With one in four young children in the United States living in an immigrant family, efforts to build trust and establish meaningful two-way communication with these families is an urgent priority,” states the report, released this week.

In recent years, U.S. policymakers have increased efforts to improve early childhood education. In January 2013, for instance, President Barack Obama introduced his Plan for Early Education for all Americans, which focuses on children to age five and includes funding high-quality preschool for all low- and moderate-income children.

Yet plans like this and others often overlook the importance of supporting immigrant parents, especially those with limited English-language proficiency. MPI’s researchers warn that fast-changing demographics in the United States are making this oversight increasingly problematic.

“Immigration for the longest time had been a five-state issue, but now it’s a 40-state issue,” Margie McHugh, one of the report’s authors, said at a briefing Monday.

Of the one in four young children in the U.S. with immigrant parents, 45 percent are low-income, and their parents are twice as likely as native-born parents to have less than a high school diploma.

“This represents a significant risk factor for many young children of immigrants,” the report states, “given that maternal educational attainment is closely linked with education outcomes for children, and parental education is closely linked with family earnings and economic well-being.”

Budget victims

Currently, no federal programme exists to explicitly support and engage immigrant parents in the United States, while ongoing budget battles in Washington are impacting on initiatives that have partially filled this gap.

The government has cut funds for Head Start, a federal programme that provides public preschool and health services to low-income children. And Even Start, a federal family literacy programme that integrated adult literacy with parenting education, was defunded in 2010.

These cuts disproportionately affect immigrant families.

Some programmes do exist, either through private or piecemeal funding, but these advocates say these typically lack accountability standards and continuity, since funding is so fickle. Such initiatives also tend not to communicate or coordinate with one another, meaning, for instance, that programmes aimed at secondary education do not build on those for primary schooling.

Focus group participants from MPI’s study said that programmes offered very limited translation and interpretation services, and generally ignored languages other than Spanish. Some projects did offer classes to parents, but long waiting lists, inconvenient hours or lack of child care reportedly deterred parents – despite a strong desire to participate.

“I don’t go to [parent engagement] programmes like this because one time I went, and the school had me waiting for an hour, standing around and waiting for an interpreter,” one parent told MPI researchers. “I was so tired of waiting – I have no idea what they told me in the end and they didn’t help me at all.”

Even when translation services are provided or parents speak English, understanding teachers or school materials requires a substantial understanding of the U.S. education lexicon and culture.

One federal project, Promise Neighborhoods, is funding a pilot programme specifically geared towards immigrant parents in a neighbourhood near Washington.

“In the majority of the families we work with, the parents are trying to be deeply engaged in their children’s lives,” Eliza Leighton, the programme’s director, told IPS.

“Many parents came to this country to make sure their kids have access to quality education, yet when they arrive they find there’s very limited information available for them.”

The lack of information leaves parents unaware of available resources and also leaves them in the dark about early childhood development.

“For example, many parents work under the misconception that they should only read to their child in English – and if it’s not in English, then they shouldn’t read at all,” Leighton says. “That’s not true. It’s wonderful to read to your child, even if it’s not in English.”

The pilot project has four main components. First are “parent promoters”, each of whom has about 50 families to connect to the community. Second is a 13-week parent and teacher class, conducted mostly in Spanish, to teach parents how to support their child’s development.

The third component is a series of community events to build a support community for immigrant parents. Finally, the last part is a class to educate teachers on the linguistic and cultural needs of their students and families.

If the programme is successful, supporters say it could be expanded throughout the country.

Data needed

MPI notes that increasing the collection of pertinent data would increase the visibility of immigrant parents for school administrators, especially parents who speak a language other than Spanish.

Currently, from the school to federal level, data collection begins in kindergarten. But more information could help teachers better understand the needs of their students and help policymakers hear demands for programming catered to immigrant parents.

Of course, programmes to educate immigrant parents overlap with the field of adult education, like adult literacy classes. However, few federal adult-education programmes meet the needs of parents that lack English-language proficiency.

“Right now, adult education programmes are only meeting about four percent of needs,” McHugh said.

“The other dynamic … is that a lot of existing capacity is dedicated to people trying to get their [high school degrees] and post-secondary degrees. And that is a desired outcome, but that type of programme does not meet the needs of immigrant parents.”

The report also stresses the need for non-traditional family literacy programmes or adult education programmes, but structured in such a way that they can wrap together cultural knowledge, language and literacy, and systems knowledge.

“Partnerships with families are a bedrock for strong early childhood development,” said Miriam Calderon, a former senior policy analyst for early learning at the White House.

Calderon highlighted the report’s recommendation to institute a federal pilot programme that can draw from the lessons of Even Start, both from what worked on the ground and also why support for the programme ultimately declined.

“Policies regarding family engagement … lack teeth and are largely misused,” said Calderon.

The vast majority of investment in Myanmar is concentrated in Yangon and other cities. Credit: Jose Javier Martin Espartosa/CC CC BY-SA 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 1 2014 (IPS)

New investments from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private-sector investment arm, may perpetuate economic inequality rather than alleviate poverty in Myanmar, critics here are warning.

The IFC has proposed five new investment projects for Myanmar (also known as Burma). But the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a rights group here, is calling on the multilateral funder to slow down these projects and analyse their potential social effects.

“The IFC has the responsibility to use its financial influence to promote transparency and reform in Burma’s corrupt business environment,” Rachel Wagley, the group’s policy director, said this week.

“Regrettably, the IFC’s recent investment proposals seem to mark a deviation from the IFC’s earlier objective to bolster the growth of microfinance in Burma and may instead exacerbate socioeconomic inequality in the country.”

In 2012, the U.S. Congress repealed sanctions prohibiting U.S. investment in Myanmar to signal its support for the country’s new nominally reformist government, which was slowly instituting democratic reforms after decades under military dictatorship.

That same year, the Washington-based IFC opened its office in Myanmar and began to assess the country’s investment and business climate. Given that over 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, IFC officials decided that the country office’s goal would be poverty alleviation, and eventually proposed five investment projects aimed at achieving this goal.

Yet of those five, three involve the construction of upscale hotels. The U.S. Campaign for Burma says it is alarmed by what appears to be a lack of environmental and social safeguards.

For one of the projects, which would develop four hotels, the IFC’s expected development impact is to “create 437 direct and indirect jobs (46 percent female) … and create demand for locally-sourced materials, services, and labour.” In addition, the project would “contribute to the domestic economies through increased tax revenue and foreign exchange inflows.”

The goal of another project, to build a business complex and more hotels, is to install what the IFC calls “critical business infrastructure”.

“The Project will add much needed supply of international standard office, retail and hospitality infrastructure to Yangon,” a project document states. “International standard business infrastructure such as these are of critical importance in attracting foreign investments in the country.”

Yet U.S. Campaign for Burma executive director Jennifer Quigley notes that the international business community has been flocking to the country since 2012.

“And any problems are not for lack of hotel rooms – that’s not what Burma needs to have a thriving business environment,” Quigley told IPS. “The issue isn’t a lack of funding but restrictions that make sure only a few benefit monetarily from foreign trade and investment.”

Safeguards concern

Another of the IFC-proposed projects, known as Yoma Equity, would provide about 30 million dollars to a programme run by Yoma Bank, a national institution, to finance small- and medium-sized businesses. Such investments are aimed at increasing access to finance for small-scale ventures and to fuel growth in the country’s private sector.

Yet while Quigley’s office supports IFC funding for small- and medium-sized enterprises, she worries that the project will not be well regulated.

“It’s widely considered that the performance standards of the IFC are very good, but then the IFC doesn’t require them to be applied,” she says. “Over 50 percent of projects are classified in such a way that they don’t require the standards.”

The IFC categorises projects in one of four ways, three of which are regulated by the agency’s environmental and social performance standards. The fourth type of project, however, known as FI for ‘financial intermediary’, is excused from these assessments.

Yoma Equity, for instance, is classified as FI-2, meaning that “its business activities have potential limited adverse environmental or social risks or impacts that are few in number,” according to the IFC’s website.

Yet according to Serene Jweied, a spokesperson for the IFC, even FI projects must follow regulations.

“Every financial institution we work with must adhere to our environmental and social requirements and integrity standards,” Jweied told IPS.

“Should IFC engage with Yoma Bank, this requirement would apply to this client as well, and Yoma Bank would have to develop an environmental and social management system commensurate with the risks of the projects and/or clients it finances.”

However, once Yoma Bank develops its own safeguards, as a financial intermediary the IFC would leave any assessment of these safeguards up to the bank itself.

Last year, an independent assessment by the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman, an internal auditor, criticised the IFC’s regulations of financial intermediaries.

The report looked, for instance, at a loan for 30 million dollars that the IFC gave to Corporation Dinant, a Honduran agribusiness company owned by one of the country’s richest men, Miguel Facusse. Dinant has been accused of killing, kidnapping or forcibly evicting peasants from land claimed by the company.

In response, the IFC has admitted to missteps around Dinant.

Reinforcing oligarchy

In the case of Yoma Equity, the intermediary corporation is less shady than Dinant but, according to observers, still questionable.

Serge Pun chairs the Serge Pun & Associates Group (SPA Group), one of Myanmar’s largest conglomerates, as well as Yoma Bank.

Quigley notes that Pun’s business dealings have raised social concerns in various sectors over the years. Indeed, the U.S. State Department recommended placing sanctions on Pun in 2008.

These never went forward, however, and as a result Pun has developed a reputation in Myanmar as a “good crony”: less corrupt than the others, and one of the few options for a local business partner.

“Everyone is investing in him,” she says, “so the IFC is perpetuating the same oligarchy that’s in place. The IFC is coming in and reinforcing the status quo.”

Meanwhile, the potential broader impact of the IFC’s projects is also under scrutiny. The majority of Burmese live in rural areas, after all, and agriculture is the livelihood of up to 70 percent of the population, according to Oxfam.

Yet most of the IFC’s projects are focusing on urban areas. Experts say this is simply continuing a broader trend being seen in Myanmar since its economy began to open up.

“A significant factor contributing to the urban versus rural income inequality is that the vast majority of investment in Burma is concentrated in the urban sector, despite the fact that only one-third of the population lives in these areas,” Dennis McCornac, of Loyola University, stated in a recent essay.

Rail networks in Africa remain underdeveloped only 10 percent of transport goes via rail. A train crossing the Namib Desert on its way from the Namibian port of Walvis Bay to the uranium rich Erongo Region. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON , May 23 2014 (IPS)

Democratic governance offers a viable option for developing countries to achieve economic growth and inclusion, yet this doesn’t need to follow the Western model, new research released here this week suggests.

India, Brazil and South Africa (collectively known as IBSA) each demonstrates how racially diverse nations with very poor constituents can make large gains in development under democratic systems. A joint paper presented here this week suggests these systems collectively offer a democratic alternative from the Global South.

The joint project, known as Democracy Works, also pushes back on a trend that has strengthened in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis: policy discussion over the benefits of authoritarian systems. Key in this debate has been the Chinese government, which has continued to deliver high levels of growth and lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

“What interests me about this story is that the global debate about this is very real,” Anne Applebaum, the project’s editor, said this week at a Washington launch of the Democracy Works final report.

“A few days ago the president of Egypt made a comment that ‘We can’t have that Western style of democracy – it just won’t work.’ And the point is that, to more countries than you may think, there does seem like there’s a dichotomy: you can choose to be Sweden, on the one hand, or China.”

Democracy Works is a collaboration between the Legatum Institute, in London, and the Centre for Development and Enterprise, in Johannesburg.

While the project highlights the IBSA nations as examples from the Global South where democracy has worked, it starts from an understanding that democracy is neither better nor worse than authoritarian regimes at economic development.

“We know from various empirical studies that democracy, as a form of governance, neither helps nor hurts economic development,” Ted Piccone, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, told IPS.

“The one advantage that democracies have is that they avoid the big swings that you see in non-democratic states with high peaks and low periods, and those low periods can trigger famine, hunger, violence, conflict. In general, there’s more open competition around political power, and that gives the investor or business community more predictability and reliability.”

IBSA model

Despite starkly differing histories, India, Brazil and South Africa are today all considered stable democracies, and each has experienced high strong growth seen as benefiting large numbers of people.

“These three countries demonstrate that it is possible to be an ethnically divided, socioeconomically divided, unequal, relatively poor country, and nevertheless maintain a democracy,” Applebaum says.

“Democracy confers some advantages – human rights, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. And while having all those things, you can have, at the same time, economic development.”

Of the three, South Africa is the youngest democracy, transitioning only in 1994. The ruling party, the African National Congress, has instituted reforms aimed at mitigating racial imbalances in terms of jobs and land ownership, and the country’s democratic system is credited with allowing for far greater political participation than during apartheid.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s poverty rate has declined, particularly over the past decade, according to most ways of calculating this figure.

Brazil returned to democracy during the 1980s, though since then the country’s economic growth has been erratic. However, the overall trend of economic growth and robust welfare programmes has left Brazil with increased investment, rising productivity and falling income inequality, the Democracy Works analysts note.

Finally, India, one of the world’s largest and most pluralistic countries, has been a stable democracy for the past six and a half decades, ranking 38th out of 165 countries on the Democracy Index put out by The Economist magazine.

In 1991, the country liberalised many aspects of its economy, leading to social concerns but also to a rapid economic growth rate of 8.5 percent, as of 2010 (this figure has since come down). Growth and wealth have also extended to members of the most marginalised parts of society.

India is also an example of successful coalition government, belying the idea that coalitions tend to slow economic growth. Further, there are important ancillary benefits to broadening decision-making: democracies may grow slower, but they also tend to grow more equitably.

For instance, in Brazil between 1990 and 2010, gross domestic product per capita grew from roughly 5,000 to 12,000 dollars. During that same period, a measure of inequality known as the Gini coefficient (where 0 is total equality) fell from .60 to .53.

An opposite trend has been seen in China, meanwhile. Since 1980, shortly after the country began economic reforms, the Chinese Gini coefficient grew from 0.3 to 0.55.

“Democracies are better equipped to deal with inequities,” says Brookings’ Piccone. “Not automatically … you certainly have high levels of inequality in IBSA and the U.S., so it’s a political choice. But at least it’s a choice and allows for debate to happen and for policies to change.”

Less drama

Indeed, the IBSA countries continue to face significant, even mounting, challenges. Analysts point to ongoing corruption in government sapping the effectiveness of state programmes, while others suggest that redistributive social schemes need to find a better balance with macroeconomic principles.

The authors of Democracy Works recommend that more democracy, rather than less, is the solution. For example, strengthening institutions and checks and balances to cut down on corruption, they say, would make state social policies more efficient by making sure that the resources actually reach the poorest.

The report discusses an Indian website that allows people to report incidences of bribery for government services. One transportation department in India was cited so frequently that its commissioner brought in workers from the website to present their findings to his staff, in an attempt to get them to decrease the amounts of bribes they were demanding.

When a similar site launched in China, the government shut it down within weeks

“Democracies are not just an instrumental tool to get better development but a good in and of itself,” Piccone says.

“That’s what’s interesting about IBSA … they’ve done very well economically and they’ve delivered very well for their citizens, including access to health services, education, longer life expectation, lower infant mortality, etc.”

He continues: “It’s not true that [developing countries] have to follow the authoritarian model. These democracies can grow and deliver … growth may not be as dramatic, but the bad times may not be as dramatic, either.”

A smelter at the El Teniente mine, which produces 37 percent of Chile’s copper. Credit:Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 16 2014 (IPS)

China’s massive urbanisation has been built, literally, by metal, supplied mostly by Latin American countries (LAC). Yet now China’s slowing economic growth and falling commodity prices threaten Latin American commodity booms.

“As commodity prices decline, Latin American policy-makers will wish that they had used some of the benefits of the commodity-boom to diversify into other sectors,” Kevin Gallagher, professor at Boston University and author of a recent China-Latin America bulletin published by Boston University’s Global Economic Government Initiative (GEGI), told IPS."That the prices go down is actually good for China, the buyers of the commodities, not so much for the Brazilian and Chilean exporters." -- Matt Ferhen

Regarding China’s growth rate and commodity prices, the report states, “Whereas from 2006 to 2011 the IMF primary commodity price index soared by an average annual rate of 9.8 percent and the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of 10.5 percent, in 2012 commodity prices fell by 3.2 percent and the Chinese economy slowed to 7.7 percent.”

The fall in commodity prices disproportionately affects LAC, as 86.4 percent of LAC exports to China are primary goods, while 63.4 percent of Chinese exports to LAC are manufactured.

“As prices rose, exports grew and growth improved significantly. Latin America can thank China and the commodity boom for not being so affected by the [global] financial crisis [of 2008-2009]. However, exchange rates appreciated, investment concentrated in commodities, manufacturers couldn’t compete with imports from China and beyond, and commodity-led growth led to numerous social and environmental conflicts,” said Gallagher.

According to the GEGI report, average annual export growth from LAC to China averaged 23 percent between 2006 and 2011, but dropped to 7.2 percent in 2012. These exports are mainly concentrated in copper, iron, and soy. The metals exports are densely concentrated in two countries: 86 percent of iron exports came from Brazil and 92 percent of copper comes from Chile.

China’s exports to LAC are significantly more diverse, coming mostly from manufactured goods like electronics and vehicles that are less sensitive to pricing variables than commodity goods. Effectively, commodity price declines have created a trade imbalance between LAC and China inChina’s favour.

“China bases its relationship with Latin America on its idea of win-win, complementary South-South relations, and they’ve been able to hang their hat a bit on high-price commodity trade that benefits reciprocally,” said Matt Ferhen, head of China and the Developing World Programme at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, at a discussion held here Thursday at the Inter-American Dialogue.

“That the prices go down is actually good for China, the buyers of the commodities, not so much for the Brazilian and Chilean exporters, where we might see some difficulties in the relationship.”

In response to slowed growth, the Chinese public demanded that the government institute financial reforms. Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced a series of reforms that have yet to be enacted.

“There is discussion under new party leadership about rebalancing China’s economy, away from heavy exports and government investment…consumption is meant to replace exports and government led investment and behind this is a new growing middle-class that will then further drive economic growth,” Ferhen said.

This new economic model responds to pessimistic concerns that government has invested heavily in transit, property development and infrastructure that might never be used and only increase debt. Yet a switch to emphasising internal consumption comes at the expense of LAC commodity exporters.

“Most LAC governments are not well prepared for a commodity price decline. Chile has a strong copper stabilisation fund and sovereign wealth fund that captured some of the commodity boom and stands ready to help out. Most other countries, such as Peru, were never able to admit that the price would change as they locked in a commodity-led growth path,” Gallagher told IPS.

Yet research by institutions like the World Bank suggests that Latin America is not as susceptible to external shocks in the commodity markets as in the 1980s and 1990s.

First, most LAC have instituted macro-financial immune systems, such as paying down debts, accumulating reserves, and reducing dependence on the dollar. The degree to which each country is insulated against external shocks varies.

For example, although the investment rate in the region is almost 25 percent of gross domestic product, close to the rate in Southeast Asia, Brazil’s rate is lower, at 18 percent, and critics say Venezuela has not invested its oil revenues smartly.

A semiannual report from the World Bank also highlights that LAC has rebalanced “its sources of financing away from portfolio and bank credit flows and towards foreign direct investment and remittances.”

On another positive note, China foreign direct investment in LAC, especially in infrastructure and energy, should positively influence LAC economies. Chinese presence, especially in mergers and acquisitions, has also expanded beyond traditional partners like Argentina and Brazil to include Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru.

Experts hope that these other markets, particularly energy, can offset the commodity trade decline, which is expected to only decrease in 2014.

Based on data from the World Bank, the IMF, and the Economist Intelligence Unit Global Forecasting Intelligence, the GEGI report predicts a 3.1 percent price decline in the LAC-China export basket, nearly twice as deep as the 2013 price decline, implying a growing LAC-China trade deficit in goods for 2014.

The effect on countries’ growth will be nuanced across the region, based both on external factors, domestic demand factors, and internal economic policies. The World Bank predicts Panama will continue growth near seven percent, followed by Peru at five and a half percent.

They predict Chile and Colombia will hover around three and a half percent, Mexico at three percent, and Brazil close to two percent. Venezuela is expected to contract one percent.

This contraction in commodity-based markets has effects beyond Latin America.

“This is not just a concern within Latin America, but globally – Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. One of the interesting elements of this, and thinking of those who are interested in and concerned about the impact of labour, environment impact, questions of FDI, this is a shared concern across many nations,” said Fehren.

A moment of silence in held in Washington, DC May 6th for the 234 missing Nigerian school girls who were abducted by Boko Haram on Apr. 14. Credit: Senate Democrats/cc by 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Amidst intensifying concern over the fate of more than 200 girls abducted by a radical Islamist group in northern Nigeria, at least 100 representatives of various activist groups Tuesday pressed the U.S. Senate to approve legislation designed to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls and discourage child marriages around the world.

Introduced by a bipartisan group of senators last week, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) would use existing foreign aid to achieve the bill’s major aims and mandate greater coordination of existing U.S. government programmes that address gender-based violence.A 10 percent reduction in child marriages could lead to a 70 percent reduction in infant mortality, according to the activist group Girls Not Brides.

“If passed, it would mean there would be enduring legislation and policy in place by the U.S. government towards violence against women that would not be based on the politics of any particular administration,” Jacqueline Hart, vice president for strategic learning, research, and evaluation at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), told IPS.

AJWS, an international development and human rights group, helped organise the activist lobbying.

IVAWA is no stranger on the Hill; its previous version was shelved as a result of right-wing Republican concerns that it could be used to support abortions and other women’s reproductive rights. The latest version was introduced in the House of Representatives late last year, where it was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Gender-based violence is one of the world’s most prevalent human rights abuses, and has one of the greatest degrees of impunity surrounding it, according to the activist groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

At least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to U.N. Women.

“This Act makes ending violence against women and girls a top diplomatic priority,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in a press statement.

“The world has just seen an appalling example of women and girls being treated as property and political bargaining chips in Nigeria, where the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 school girls and is threatening to sell them into slavery and forced marriages.

“Sadly, this is not a viewpoint limited to terrorist leaders: the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) says one in nine girls around the world is married before the age of 15, a harmful practice that deprives girls of their dignity and often their education, increases their health risks, and perpetuates poverty.”

Child brides in rural Senegal at work. Marriage before the age of 18 is a generally common practice in Senegal, with 16 percent of young women getting married and give birth before reaching 15. Credit: Issa Sikiti da Silva/IPS

Indeed, in addition to supporting programmes designed to support national legislation criminalising violence and abuse of girls and women, to provide training to police, prosecutors, and judges to handle such cases, and expand health facilities for women and girls, the bill would support projects aimed at offering girls and women more choices in life, particularly in education and economic opportunity, particularly in countries where early marriage is commonly practiced.

About 14 million girls are married before the age of 18 every year, according to Girls Not Brides. The largest proportion of early marriages occurs in Africa’s Sahel region.

In Niger, some 75 percent of girls are married early, followed by the Central African Republic and Chad. Early marriages occur in every region of the world, with the largest number in India.

According to UNIFEM, 64 million girls are child brides worldwide.

Early marriages inflict abuse on girls and women in many ways, from sexual violence to poor health.

They also increase the chance of physical or sexual abuse in a relationship. In Ethiopia, 81 percent of child brides describe their first physical experience as forced.

The issue is also tied to development. A 10 percent reduction in child marriages could lead to a 70 percent reduction in infant mortality, according to the activist group Girls Not Brides.

The lobbying day on Capitol Hill followed a policy summit hosted Monday by AJWS that featured new research on early marriage undertaken by Nirantar, an Indian feminist resource group.

The research, not yet formally published, focuses less on the appropriate age for marriage than on the role played by the institution of marriage in India’s social structure.

“When we talk about early marriage, it is always the early part we talk about, but what about the marriage part?” asked Archana Dwivedi, deputy director of Nirantar. “What is magic about the age 18?

“We often used child marriage as synonymous for forced marriage, but that is not the case,” she told IPS. “All marriages under 18 are not forced, and all marriages above 18 are not chosen. Imagine a gay boy married to a girl or a lesbian girl married to a man? It can be equally, if not more traumatic, because marriage is also license to have sex.”

Focusing on the age of 18 also diverts attention from girls over 18 who are still suffering the consequences of marrying young, she said. Although often overlooked, these consequences extend beyond the physical health of the women.

“There is too much focus on maternal health, which reinforces the patriarchal thinking that women are there to reproduce healthy children….What about her mental health, how she feels? After marriage, all the opportunities in her life are a given…there is nothing left in life to dream of or desire.”

Dwivedi argued that organisations working to end child marriages need to apply different indicators in assessing the effectiveness of their work.

While many organisations report how many early marriages they helped prevent or delay, they often fail to address the necessity of changing social and cultural attitudes about early marriage, as well as the institution itself.

Acceptance of conventional explanations for early marriage, such as blaming it on poverty, is unlikely to change long-prevalent attitudes.

Focusing on expectations surrounding marriage itself, on the other hand, will more likely lead to a broader range of choices for girls and women and thus empower them.

“Even in urban upper class families, a parent will spend half the family’s money on the education of the son and half on the marriage of the daughter,” she said.

“The attitude is that parents think marriage is the only viable solution for girls…Parents are working with the best intentions to help get their child settled, not doing it to ruin their lives, but to stabilise them. But there’s something wrong with our idea of stability.”

Numbers or people? Migrants at Lampedusa. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 10 2014 (IPS)

On the eve of a major international conference on migration in Stockholm, a major think tank here is calling on the delegates from more than 150 countries to recognise the importance of migration in forging development policies.

“International migration and development are inextricably linked,” says a statement by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in advance of next week’s seventh Global Forum for Migration and Development (GFMD).The hope is that including migration in the post-2015 goals will generate greater political will and financial resources to address the various challenges faced by migrants.

Through remittances, the money sent from migrants back to their country of origin, and by creating new networks for technology and knowledge, migration reduces poverty and helps improve access to education, according to MPI.

Banking remittances allows recipients to mobilise their savings to earn interest, buy insurance, and build credit.

“After seven years of sending money home in Mexico, I was able to buy a house for my family,” Erick Chavez, a migrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, who lives in Washington, D.C., told IPS.

Its positive effects act on both a micro and macro level, for both countries of origin and countries of destination. Yet this powerful network for development remains widely untapped, the statement asserts.

“Migrants have been instrumental in achieving development goals,” H. E. Eva Åkerman Börje, Secretariat for the Swedish Chairmanship of the GFMD, at a teleconference last week. “But potential gains are left on the table due to poor policies.”

The three-day conference, which will feature discussions among civil-society organisations (CSOs), followed by inter-governmental meetings that will include Sweden’s Princess Victoria and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, will contribute to the ongoing process of formulating the world body’s post-2015 Development Agenda that will succeed its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The hope is that including migration in the post-2015 goals and creating relevant targets and indicators will generate greater political will and financial resources to address the various challenges faced by migrants, including the costs associated with migration, such as transportation, brokers’ fees, cultural adaptation, remittances, and migrants’ rights to health, education, and fair labour.

“States have come to appreciate the magnitude of migrants’ contributions,” said Börje. “Most directly this happens through higher earning potential and hundreds of billions of dollars of remittances each year which are invested in education, health, and housing, but also through filling needs in the labour market, encouraging trade and skills between markets, and sharing ideas and technology.”

Previous GFMDs have had success in improving national policies, including gaining greater respect for migrants’ basic rights. Some of the key goals at this year’s forum include gaining consensus to reduce the cost of both remittances and international labour recruitment.

Organisers also hope that agreement can be reached on the importance of according recognition by the host countries of the professional skills, training, and education acquired by migrants in their homelands.

Migration also benefits the country of destination, according to MPI.

“Migrants are more mobile than native born workers…so they smooth out some of the discontinuity in the labour market,” Kathleen Newland, director of MPI’s Migrants, Migration, and Development Programme, told IPS.

“Also, there are studies that show a migrant population tends to be correlated with higher trade flows between countries of origin and investment and facilitate FDI (foreign direct investment) in both directions.”

Remittances, a neglected form of foreign aid

Remittances are the main driver behind development fueled by migration. Yet the high costs of relocation, finding a job, and sending the money back home limit their potential benefits.

Erick Chavez had to borrow 3,000 dollars at a steep interest rate in order to get his visa and work in the U.S.

“Back home, I worked 12 hours a day etching designs in stone. It’s very hard work. Here I can make better money…All the money I make here I use to pay my bills, then send the rest to Mexico…I send money about every two weeks through transfers at Western Union. Some goes to help my family, like paying for my brothers’ education. Even elementary school is not really free because of inscription fees,” Chavez told IPS.

Remittances like Chavez’s are an important resource enabling their families to attend school, gain access to health services, and even afford food. The money can reduce individual and household poverty and stimulate local economies to an extent that equals or exceeds the impact of official development assistance.

In 2011, formal remittances to Spanish-speaking Latin American nations totaled more than eight times foreign aid, according to a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project.

Remittances also affect a country’s macro-level economy. In El Salvador, remittances accounted for 16.5 percent of GDP in 2012. Since 2009, the World Bank has included remittance inflows in its measure of national creditworthiness.

“The important effect of remittances on a national level is often overlooked,” said Newland.

“The money comes in as foreign payment, as dollars or pounds, but is received by local people in local currency…. It has a positive impact on a country’s balance of payments and allows a country to borrow international capital.”

Research on improving remittances focuses on two things: reducing their cost and injecting them into the formal banking system.

Newland named “competition, transparency, and technology,” as the keys to reducing the cost of remittances.

“A number of countries have set up websites that show people different costs of services to help them pick the cheapest one and to place pressure on companies to meet the lowest price.”

Another policy suggestion encourages people to use banks to both deposit and transfer their earnings.

“It’s very desirable to get people to send money through formal transfers instead of by hand. Unofficial transfers don’t get counted in macro benefits,” Newland told IPS.

In addition to reaping macro benefits, banking remittances provide migrants and remittance recipients with financial inclusion.

“Basically, being able to formally save [money], own assets, have access to financially affordable institutions, earn more than subsistence wages, manage your funds well are the ingredients for economic well-being and financial independence,” Manuel Orozco,an  expert on remittances at the Inter American Dialogue, an inter-hemispheric think tank here, told IPS.

Innocent people will be executed in the United States if the country’s capital punishment system is not reformed, warns a new report.

These reforms include improving the use of forensic science, taping confessions, and providing better trained counsel to defendants. These suggestions were among 39 recommendations released Wednesday in a report by the Constitution Project, a nonpartisan group working to improve the U.S. criminal justice system."If this [Constitution Project report] had been in place before I went to trial, I probably would not have gone to death row.” -- Anthony Graves

The report’s authors, collectively known as the Death Penalty Committee, include both supporters and opponents of the death penalty. The publication comes as the United States, one of just 43 countries that haven’t outlawed capital punishment, is in the midst of one of its largest national discussions on the issue in years.

More than 30 states in the United States continue to allow the death penalty, despite findings that the capital punishment system appears to be biased against minorities – and despite dozens of known cases of innocent people being sentenced to death. Since 1973, over 140 people have been exonerated from “death row”, but critics say it is impossible to tell how many of the 1400 who have been executed may have been innocent.

“Most disturbingly, there is evidence that defendants have been put to death despite significant questions regarding their innocence, undermining confidence in the entire criminal justice system,” the report states.

“There can no longer be any doubt that innocent people do get convicted of horrific crimes, spend years in prison and even face execution. Wrongful convictions undermine society’s confidence in the ability of the criminal justice system to perform its most basic function – to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.”

The report comes just a week after a botched execution in the Midwestern state of Oklahoma. A prisoner named Clayton Lockett was scheduled to die by lethal injection, but the deadly chemicals were erroneously injected into his flesh.

The procedure reportedly drug out for almost half an hour, during which the conscious Lockett writhed in pain, according to his lawyer.

The Death Penalty Committee is recommending a single-dose injection, rather than the three drugs that Oklahoma and most other states currently use. The committee would also require that the federal government approve the drug or drugs used – a potentially important new issue given that states across the country are currently experimenting with new drugs, after pharmaceutical companies have started refusing to supply their products for lethal injections.

The horrific story has re-ignited a broad public conversation here. Yet advocates that work with the issue say that, while it is good to have the public’s attention on this issue, the more important concerns involve judicial mistakes.

“Despite the Oklahoma execution, I think the more important recommendations [in the new report] have to do with mistakes of innocence,” Richard Dieter, the executive director of Death Penalty Information Center, a clearinghouse, told IPS.

“Recommendations about improving the quality of counsel, the forensics, the DNA testing, the testing of evidence, the videotaping of suspects who are sometimes pressured into confessing something they did not want to do … these are the kinds of things that could help prevent wrongful convictions on death row and possibly wrongful executions.”

Fatal mistakes

Just this week, a federally funded study found that a minimum of four percent of prisoners on death row in the United States are innocent, according to research published Monday in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although small, any number above zero represents an innocent person sentenced to death, like Anthony Graves. Graves was convicted in 1994 for murder and sentenced to death based on testimony supplied only by the other convicted murderer, Robert Carter.

Before his own execution, Carter repeatedly admitted that Graves was not involved, but the process of re-investigation took years. Finally, in 2010, Graves was exonerated and released.

“We’re never ever going to stop killing innocent people as long as we have the penalty,” Graves said Wednesday at a panel discussion here.

“But if this”, he continued, holding up a copy of the Constitution Project report, “had been in place before I went to trial, I probably would not have gone to death row.”

Potentially of help to Graves would have been a report recommendation on videotaping custodial interrogations. Following such a procedure, proponents say, would reduce the risk of false confessions – and provide juries with the context of confessions provided.

Another series of suggestions detail how to improve the use of forensic science in providing evidence.

Mark White, a former governor of Texas and co-chair of the Death Penalty Committee, described Wednesday the forensics police department in Houston, where “leaks in the ceiling contaminated samples and people were not qualified to do the sampling.”

According to a 2011 study, over 50 percent of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA testing were convicted based on forensic mistakes.

Another problem are inadequately trained attorneys.

Mark Earley, a former attorney general of Virginia, described how he was appointed fresh out of law school to represent a defendant on trial for his life. Earley said he also witnessed incompetent representation repeatedly during his time as attorney general, when he oversaw 36 executions in three and a half years.

“For someone who is a ‘small government’ conservative, why did I believe the government always gets it right?” he askedWednesday.

“It’s not about being for or against the death penalty. But it’s about saying that if there is a death penalty, the trial process should be fair.”

Slow reform

Some say the political climate in the U.S. is ripe for reform on the issue of capital punishment. Following the botched execution in Oklahoma, last week President Barack Obama requested that Attorney General Eric Holder review the application of the death penalty throughout the country.

“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems – racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty … situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence,” Obama told reporters. “And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

Experts in the field say that reform is likely, but only after a long and slow process.

“Unfortunately the death penalty is immersed in a political ballet,” the Death Penalty Information Center’s Dieter told IPS.

“I think the death penalty is actually declining by dramatic levels, and that will probably continue. It is not serving people well: it is expensive and it is picking out those who happen to be poor and minorities.”

"Nuns on the Bus" take their campaign around the country in 2012 lobbying for social justice reforms. Credit: Tvnewsbadge/cc by 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 2 2014 (IPS)

The future of religion in U.S. politics lies not with conservatives but rather with religious progressives, social scientists here are suggesting, with a faith-based movement potentially able to provide momentum to a new movement for social justice.

According to a new report from the Brookings Institute, a think tank here, the current religious social justice movement can be compared to the period of civil rights activism in the mid-20^th century.“One of the reasons religious voices are so important now is that, especially with the weakening of the labour movement, the churches are the only mass organisation representing many, many poor people." -- E.J. Dionne

“There really is an opening now for a religious movement for social justice that is similar in many ways to the civil rights movement. We see it around issues of minimum wage, budget cuts, and immigration,” E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report, told IPS.

“On social justice issues, religion has long been a progressive force, and Pope Francis is challenging people’s assumptions that religion is an automatically conservative force … After years of paying lots of attention to religious conservatives, religion by no means lives on the right.”

The United States has a strong history of religious groups in social justice movements, including in pushing for the abolition of slavery and the institutionalisation of civil rights, as well as the social welfare programmes put in place a half-century ago. Yet today, religion and progressivism are often seen as being at odds.

According to the report, for instance, just 47 percent of white Evangelicals in the United States think government needs to do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor. On the contrary, 85 percent of Democrats hold this belief.

This schism underscores two trends that have defined the U.S. religious landscape over the past two decades: a decline in those who regularly attend religious services, and a rise in the conservative “religious right”.

According to the report, these trends are interrelated, as “many young Americans were not turned off by faith itself but by the rightward trend they perceive among leaders. To young adults … ‘religion’ means ‘Republican,’ ‘intolerant,’ and ‘homophobic.’”

Yet despite these trends of growing secularisation, Dionne said, “a religious voice will remain essential to movements on behalf of the poor and the marginalised and also on behalf of the middle-class Americans who are under increasing pressure at a time of inequality.”

Further, demographics indicate that this religious voice will not be from the conservative wing, Dionne suggests. During the last presidential election here, in 2012, the ages of the religious coalitions that voted for President Barack Obama versus his Republican rival, Mitt Romney were starkly different.

Of those who considered themselves actively religious, Romney voters were primarily elderly, while Obama’s supporters skewed far younger. “What’s clear,” the report suggests, “is that the religious right is not the way of the future.”

Congregational decline

The Brookings researchers acknowledge steep challenges facing any incipient religious movement in the U.S. for social justice.

A primary challenge is congregational decline. In 1958, about 49 percent of Americans attended church services weekly, while today that number is down to about 18 percent.

This decline naturally decreases the coalition size and donor base available for grassroots work. In addition, this has often been accompanied by a decreased respect for religious groups, exacerbating divides between those who consider themselves religious versus secular.

Tensions also exist when religious groups try to engage in political issues without using morally ambiguous political methods. For example, many religious progressive leaders want to abstain from the “quid pro quo” nature of political deal-making.

Ideological divides within religious communities can threaten the work of social justice advocates, especially opposition from single-issue groups.

For example, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), which supports a spectrum of faith-based grassroots organisations, provided over nine million dollars in grants to over 214 groups last year. However, after Catholic anti-abortion groups pushed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to strictly regulate donations from Catholic coalitions, some CCHD grants were cut – even if the projects had only tangential connections to abortion or same-sex marriage.

Still, many groups have overcome such challenges.

Prominent examples in this regard include Circle of Protection, an alliance of Christian leaders who have banded together to try to protect pro-poor government programmes from budget cuts. Likewise, Nuns on the Bus, a group of Catholic nuns who travel the country lobbying for social justice reforms, played a role in the 2012 elections.

“One of the reasons religious voices are so important now is that, especially with the weakening of the labour movement, the churches are the only mass organisation representing many, many poor people,” said Dionne.

“Some research we did showed that, for example, in neighbourhood community development, the pastors are the only people who could get the attention of the banks.”

The report notes that these religious progressive groups are very active and often successful, but lack the fanfare that can receive broad public attention.

Building coalitions

Another U.S. group, the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), has focused on trying to influence corporate decision-making, both domestically and internationally, from an interfaith perspective for nearly a half-century.

“Frankly, those who are ideologically or politically divided can learn something from ICCR,” Laura Berry, the group’s executive director, told IPS. “There are some areas where the right and the left agree, after all, and finding those places to build coalitions are wonderful opportunities to reverse trends in inequality.”

Berry highlighted ICCR’s work following last year’s collapse of Rana Plaza, the Bangladeshi garment factory that killed more than 1100 people. Since then, ICCR has led a coalition representing over 4.1 trillion dollars in managed assets, pushing over 160 companies to have their overseas factories inspected, to hire and train labour inspectors, and to adopt improved worker safety standards.

According to Berry, ICCR’s own experience elucidates several of the trends indicated by the Brookings report.

“We’ve become increasingly driven by a broader coalition that includes increasingly secular progressive voices,” she says. “First we were only religious. But now we include more secular members, like labour unions and asset managers.”

ICCR is also facing many of the challenges outlined in the Brookings report, Berry says, particularly over ideological divides. Yet she notes that important areas of overlap and opportunity continue to arise.

“There are positive signs of improved coalition-building in human rights, like human trafficking, among Evangelicals and progressive Christians,” she says.

“We’re not going to let the ideological divide in the broad Christian community prevent us from talking about inequality … And we’re starting to see some leaders like Pope Francis who are saying things out loud, and people are asking, ‘Is that progressive? Is that conservative?’”

Faith leaders gathered at the United States Peace Institute to solidify a common stance on nuclear disarmament. Credit: Courtesy of SGI

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 25 2014 (IPS)

On the eve of next week’s meeting at the U.N. headquarters in New York on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), more than 100 representatives of 11 faith groups from around the world have pledged to step up their efforts to seek the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

Gathered at the U.S. Institute of Peace here Thursday, the participants, composed of influential representatives of the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, among others, said their traditions teach that the threat posed by nuclear weapons was “unacceptable and must be eliminated”.“Nuclear deterrence theory does not work like it used to. In order to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, the only way is to create an era in which there are no nuclear weapons.” -- Hirotsugu Terasaki

Soka Gakkai International, a global grassroots Buddhist organisation based in Japan, hosted the event.

“The continued existence of nuclear weapons forces humankind to live in the shadow of apocalyptic destruction,” according to a statement issued at the end of the one-day conference.

“The catastrophic consequences of any use of nuclear weapons cannot be fully communicated by numbers or statistics; it is a reality that frustrates the power of both rational analysis and ordinary imagination.”

Signatories of the statement include representatives from the Muslim American Citizens Coalition and Public Affairs Council, the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Pax Christi International.

The conference, the latest in a series on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, came as delegates from around the world prepared to convene in New York for the NPT PrepCom, set to run Apr. 28 through May 9. That meeting will help lay the groundwork for the 2015 Review Conference, also slated for New York, on implementing the NPT’s goals of non-proliferation and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear deterrence theory does not work like it used to. In order to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, the only way is to create an era in which there are no nuclear weapons,” Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, told IPS.

“The president of our organisation has said, ‘Nuclear weapons are not a necessary evil, they are an absolute evil.’”

Prodding the process

One goal of Thursday’s symposium was to flesh out the fatal consequences of nuclear weapons, including ramifications that go well the immediate fallout of a nuclear strike.

For instance, keynote speaker Dr. Andrew Kanter, former director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, told the participants of scientific findings that even a small detonation could cause a widespread deadly famine by accelerating climate change and disrupting global agriculture.

Others discussed the need to engage the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council in the broader conversation. As a first step, Thursday’s statement will be presented next week to the chair of the NPT PrepCom.

“We need to think again about what we mean by security and how we experience security,” Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International, said. “As faith-based communities, we are in a position to ask those kinds of questions.”

Since 1970, when the NPT became effective, its regular review conferences have produced few successes other than the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bars all nuclear explosions – including those, such as took place in the Marshall Islands, for testing purposes.

Additionally, the five nuclear-armed signatories have met annually since 2009. Last week, they met in Beijing where they reaffirmed past commitments and solidified a reporting framework to share national progress on meeting treaties.

Also present at Thursday’s symposium was Anita Friedt, an official on nuclear policy at the U.S. State Department. She described some of the reasons that nuclear abolition has been such a frustratingly slow process.

More than 100 representatives of 11 faith groups from around the world have pledged to step up their efforts to seek the global abolition of nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy of SGI

“Why can’t we just stop and give up nuclear weapons? This is really hard work,” Friedt said.

“If we just say today we’re just going to give up nuclear weapons, there’s no incentive for other countries to do so, necessarily. Unfortunately, it is more complex than it may seem at the surface.”

There are also significant bureaucratic challenges to the ongoing NPT negotiations. The U.S. Congress, for instance, failed to ratify the CTBT in 1999 and only barely ratified President Barack Obama’s New START Treaty – a strategic arms-reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia – in 2010.

“It’s a slower pace than I would like; it’s a slower pace than our president would like,” Friedt said.

Yet SGI’s Terasaki says global faith communities are well placed use their broad leverage to try to influence, and speed up, this process. Thursday’s event, he noted, was the first time such a discussion had come to the United States.

“We want to help re-energise the voice of faith communities,” he said, “and explore ways to raise public awareness of the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons.”

Obligation to disarm

The conference occurred on the same day that the Marshall Islands filed an unprecedented lawsuit before the International Court of Justice against the United States and eight other nuclear-armed countries for not upholding their commitments to the NPT and international law.

“Article VI [of the NPT] defines an obligation to negotiate in good faith for an end to nuclear arms and disarmament,” David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a consultant to the Marshall Islands lawsuit, filed Thursday, told IPS.

“This lawsuit indicates that each of the nuclear armed states are modernising their nuclear arsenal. You can’t modernise your arsenal and say you’re negotiating in good faith.”

Five countries are currently party to the NPT: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. However, the Marshall Islands is also suing India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, claiming that those countries are bound to the same nuclear disarmament provisions under international law.

The small island nation, in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean, is not suing for monetary compensation. Rather, its government wants the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare the nine countries in breach of their treaty obligations and to issue an injunction ordering them to begin negotiating in good faith.

Krieger says the Marshall Islands have “suffered gravely” as a result of nuclear testing carried out by the United States between 1946 and 1958.

“They don’t want any other country or people to suffer the consequences that they have,” he said, noting that the residents of the Marshall Islands have suffered health effects in the generations since the testing stopped, including stillborn babies and abnormally high rates of cancer.

Out of the nine nuclear-armed countries, only the United Kingdom, India and Pakistan accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction. The other six countries, including the United States, are not to be invited to the court in order to state their reasons for not fulfilling their obligations under the NPT.

Still, just to be sure that the United States answers for its responsibility to the NPT, the Marshall Islands has also filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco.

In the United States, African American children continue to face more barriers to success than any other race, new research suggests.

A new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation lists 12 categories that can contribute to a child’s success, including enrolment in preschool, living with two parents and distance from the poverty line. Under these metrics, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders scored highest (with a total score of 776 out of 1000), followed by whites (704).“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.” -- David Osher

African American children not only scored the lowest under this ranking, but with a score of just 345 they were found to have less than half of the indicators for potential success as other races in the United States.

“We know that the current status of poor kids is bad, the current status of black kids is bad, and the combination of poverty and racial discrimination is particularly toxic,” David Osher, vice-president of the American Institute for Research, told IPS. “But we also know enough to make a difference, like the emerging understanding that kicking kids out of schools is not a good solution.”

Osher refers to new civil rights-related data released by the U.S. Department of Education last month. These findings suggest that African American students are being suspended from school at inordinate levels, even at the very earliest grades.

While a fifth of public preschool students in the United States are African American, nearly half of all preschool students who received more than one out-of-school preschool suspension are African American. White students, on the other hand, represent 43 percent of public preschool enrolment but make up just 23 percent of preschoolers given out-of-school suspension.

“This data collection shines a clear, unbiased light on places that are delivering on the promise of an equal education for every child and places where the largest gaps remain,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on releasing the new data. “In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed.”

The study marked the first time that a federal initiative known as the Civil Rights Data Collection included preschool, but the numbers reflect similar trends at all levels of lower and secondary school.

“Black children are not behaving worse,” Jim Eichner, the managing director of programmes at the Advancement Project, an advocacy group, told IPS. “But they are being punished and punished more severely.”

Zero tolerance

While the reasons children are suspended in preschool are not reported, anecdotally such actions appear to be being taken for relatively minor infractions, such as like “not paying attention, being late or talking back,” Eichner says.

Out-of-school suspension has multiple and varied negative impacts on the student and school community. Not only do students miss class time, but they tend to receive the message they are not welcome in school.

Such actions also tend to create new mistrust between the student and teachers that can challenge future learning.

In addition, out-of-school suspension can jeopardise a family’s income if a parent needs to leave work. Or, if a parent cannot leave work, the child may not be sent to a well-supervised home.

Finally, some advocates worry that excluding a child fails to teach him or her how to manage the behaviour that originally caused the problem.

Suspending children at such a young age comes from a “zero tolerance” discipline policy. Such an approach stems from anti-drugs policy adopted by the U.S. criminal justice system during the 1980s, and brought into schools as an attempt to combat increased violence and school shootings.

Yet the broader approach has been seen as something of a failure by the U.S. criminal justice system, a view increasingly being adopted by those working in the school system, as well.

Both Osher and Eichner, for instance, are involved in studying and promoting alternatives to zero-tolerance policies. Eichner particularly points to restorative justice techniques that have students work together to mend any problems, adding that punitive atmospheres have been found to harm all students.

Implicit bias

Although the Civil Rights Data Collection does not investigate why these disparities occur, Osher and Eichner both explain that this is one effect of overarching social, economic and political structures.

“There are disparities in all aspects of youth life: education, juvenile justice and corrections, health. When you control for any of the explanations people come up with, they don’t work,” Osher says.

“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.”

He notes that here are several characteristics related to classrooms from which more kids are suspended. These include class size, the ratio between teachers and students, teacher stress levels, and the availability of mental health consultation.

Both Osher and Eichner also note the role of implicit bias in teachers.

“People can be very well-intended, but in moments of stress they can make a subtle set of calculations that are probably intuitive on whether to get more help or whether to tell the kid to get out,” said Osher.

This implicit bias appears to be particularly notable when dealing with young black preschool students. Researchers have found, for instance, that people tend to overestimate the age of black students, adding as much as three years, thus perceiving the student as less childlike and less innocent.

The first step in ending implicit bias is to name it and talk about it, scholars say.

Some are working on “peer coaching” models, for instance, in which teachers film themselves teaching. Peers can then point out ways a teacher might be acting with bias – and recommend ways to overcome it.

New approaches like this make Osher optimistic that ongoing today’s racial disparity can be decreased.

“These indicators don’t have to be predictors of the future,” he says. “Rather, they’re indicators for what public policy should do.”

An indigenous community in the United States has filed a petition against the federal government, alleging that officials have repeatedly broken treaties and that the court system has failed to offer remedy.

The petition was filed by the Onondaga Nation, a Native American tribe and one of more than 650 sovereign peoples recognised by the U.S. government. Onondaga representatives are calling on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights arm of the pan-regional Organisation of American States (OAS), to intervene.“We understand that the U.S. does not adhere to the OAS, but I don’t know where we go. We’ve exhausted our avenues.” -- Onondaga leader Sid Hill

In 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a case against New York State, stating the state government had repeatedly violated treaties signed with the Onondaga, resulting in lost land and severe environmental pollution. Yet advocates for the trips say antiquated legal precedents with racist roots have allowed the courts to consistently dismiss the Onondaga’s case.

They are now looking to the IACHR for justice.

“New York State broke the law and now the U.S. government has failed to protect our lands, which they promised to us in treaties,” Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or spiritual leader, of the Onondaga people, told IPS.

Hill and others from the Onondaga Nation gathered outside the White House, located near the IACHR’s Washington headquarters, on Tuesday. Hill brought an heirloom belt commissioned for the Onondaga Nation by George Washington, the first U.S. president, to ratify the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming land rights for the Onondaga and other tribes.

In their petition to the IACHR, the Onondaga quote sections from the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790. Signed by George Washington, this law assured the Onondaga that their lands would be safe, and if threatened, that the federal courts would protect their rights.

Yet since then, tribal advocates say, their 2.5 million acres of land has shrunk to just 6,900 acres. And rather than helping the Onondaga, the courts have ignored their case.

“We filed the original case in 2005,” Joe Heath, the attorney for the Onondaga Nation, told IPS.

“We did not sue, did not demand any return for original land. It was more aimed at protecting sacred sites and environmental issues … Our case was dismissed in 2010, so we appealed to the Second Circuit.”

The Second Circuit, and finally the Supreme Court, dismissed the case.

Landmark law

Since 2005, the U.S. courts have designed a new set of rules, called “equitable defence”. This now arms New York with a two-part defence in the Onondaga case. First, officials are able to argue that too much time has passed since the 1794 treaty was signed to when the case was filed, in 2005.

Second, equitable defence also states that the court is able to determine on its own whether the Onondaga people have been disturbed on their land.

“The legal ground on which [the Onondaga] claims rest has undergone profound change since the Nation initiated its action,” the District Court concluded. “The law today forecloses this Court from permitting these claims to proceed.”

The Onondaga Nation and other Native American nations are now fighting to change Native American land laws.

Current legal precedents go back to the 1400s, when Pope Alexander VI issued a papal decree that gave European monarchs sovereignty over “lands occupied by non-Christian ‘barbarous nations’”. In a case in 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court applied this principle to uphold the possession of indigenous lands in favour of colonial or post-colonial governments.

The Supreme Court again revived this doctrine as recent as 2005, when another New York tribe, the Oneida Nation, refused to pay taxes to the United States, citing its status as a sovereign nation.

“Under the Doctrine of Discovery … fee title to the land occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the 2005 decision.

This doctrine still underpins Indian land law and the dismissal of the Onondaga Nation’s case.

“This is the Plessy v. Ferguson of Indian law,” Heath told IPS, referring to a notorious landmark judicial decision that, for a time, upheld racial segregation in the United States.

Most polluted lake

Heath and others say the goal in “correcting” the U.S. legal system would be to provide the Onondaga Nation and other tribes more say in environmental decisions. Front and centre in this argument is the travesty they say has been visited on Onondaga Lake.

“Onondaga Lake, a sacred lake, has been turned into the most polluted lake in the country,” Heath says. “Allied Corp. dumped mercury in the lake every day from 1946 to 1970.”

In 1999, Allied Corp., a major chemicals company, purchased Honeywell, a company popularly associated with thermostats, and adopted its name, to try and shed its association with pollution. However, this merger has made it more difficult for the Onondaga Nation to get the company to clean up the lake.

“Before the Europeans got here, we had a very healthy lifestyle,” Heath said.

“All the water was clean and drinkable … With the loss of land, pollution of water, and loss of access to water, health has been impacted negatively.”

Another problem is salt mining.

“Only one body of water flows through the territory, Onondaga Creek, and this creek is now severely polluted as a result of salt mining upstream,” Heath says. “The salt mining was done over a century, and so recklessly that it severely damaged the hydrogeology in the valley.”

Heath says elder members of the Onondaga community can remember clear waters that supported trout fishing.

“Now you can’t see two inches into the water, it looks like yesterday’s coffee,” he says.

The Onondaga Nation is now waiting to see whether IACHR will hear the case.

This normally takes several years, however. And even if the court hears the case, it has no formal enforcement mechanisms, but can only make recommendations to the United States.

“We understand that the U.S. does not adhere to the OAS,” Onondaga leader Hill said. “But I don’t know where we go. We’ve exhausted our avenues.”

An open drainage ditch in Ankorondrano-Andranomahery. Madagascar receives just 0.5 dollars per person per year for WASH programmes . Credit: Lova Rabary-Rakontondravony/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 12 2014 (IPS)

World leaders on Friday discussed plans to expand sustainable access for water, sanitation and hygiene, focusing in particular on how to reach those in remote rural areas and slums where development projects have been slow to penetrate.

The meeting, which took place amidst the semi-annual gatherings here of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) could be the world’s largest ever to take place on the issue."Ministers are much happier to talk and support a hydro project, like a huge dam, and are less happy to open up a public latrine." -- Darren Saywell

Water, sanitation and hygiene, collectively known as WASH, constitute a key development metric, yet sanitation in particular has seen some of the poorest improvements in recent years.

Participants at Friday’s summit included U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake as well as dozens of government ministers and civil society leaders.

“Today 2.5 billion people do not have access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene,” the World Bank’s Kim said Friday. “This results in 400 million missed school days, and girls and women are more likely to drop out because they lack toilets in schools or are at risk of assault.”

Kim said that this worldwide lack of access results in some 260 billion dollars in annual economic losses – costs that are significant on a country-to-country basis.

In Niger, Kim said, these losses account for around 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) every year. In India the figure is even higher – around 6.4 percent of GDP.

Friday’s summit was convened by UNICEF.

“UNICEF’s mandate is to protect the rights of children and make sure they achieve their full potential. WASH is critical to what we hope for children to achieve, as well as to their health,” Sanjay Wijesekera, associate director of programmes for UNICEF, told IPS.

“Every day, 1400 children die from diarrhoea due to poor WASH. In addition, 165 million children suffer from stunted growth, and WASH is a contributory factor because clean water is needed to absorb nutrients properly.”

Over 40 countries came to the meeting to share their commitments to improving WASH.

“Many countries have already shown that progress can be made,” Wijesekera said. “Ethiopia, for example, halved those without access to water from 92 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2012, and equitably across the country.”

A water kiosk in Blantyre, Malawi. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

Good investment

Indeed, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for water halved the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water five years ahead of schedule. Yet the goal to improve access to quality sanitation facilities was one of the worst performing MDGs.

In order to get sanitation on track, a global partnership was created called Sanitation and Water for All (SWA), made up of over 90 developing country governments, donors, civil society organisations and other development partners.

“Sanitation as a subject is a complicated process … You have different providers and actors involved at the delivery of the service,” Darren Saywell, the SWA vice-chair, told IPS.

“NGOs are good with convening communities and community action plans. The private sector is needed to respond and provide supply of goods when demand is created. Government needs to help regulate and move the different leaders in the creation of markets.”

In addition, sanitation and hygiene are not topics that can gain easy political traction.

“It is not seen as something to garner much political support,” Saywell says. “Ministers are much happier to talk and support a hydro project, like a huge dam, and are less happy to open up a public latrine.”

Saywell says that an important part of SWA’s work is to demonstrate that investing in WASH is a good economic return.

“Every dollar invested in sanitation brings a return of roughly five dollars,” he says. “That’s sexy!”

Sustainable investments

Friday’s summit covered three main issues: discussing the WASH agenda for post-2015 (when the current MDGs expire), tackling inequality in WASH, and determining how these actions will be sustainable.

“We would like the sector to the set the course for achieving universal access by 2030,” Henry Northover, the global head of policy at WaterAid, a key NGO participant, told IPS.

Although the meeting did not set the post-2015 global development goals for WASH, it was meant to call public attention to the importance of these related goals and ways of achieving them.

“Donors and developing country governments need to stop seeing sanitation as an outcome of development, but rather as an indispensable driver of poverty reduction,” Northover said.

WaterAid recently published a report on inequality in WASH access, Bridging the Divide. The study looks at the imbalances in aid targeting and notes that, for instance, Jordan receives 850 dollars per person per year for WASH while Madagascar, which has considerably worse conditions, receives just 0.5 dollars per person per year.

The report says this imbalance in aid targeting is due to “geographical or strategic interests, historical links with former colonies, and domestic policy reasons”. Northover added to this list, noting that “donors are reluctant to invest in fragile states.”

“In India, despite spectacular levels of growth over the past 10 years, we have seen barely any progress in the poorest areas in terms of gaining access to sanitation,” he continued. “Regarding inequality, we are talking both in terms of wealth and gender: the task falls to women and girls to fetch water, they cannot publicly defecate, and have security risks.”

Others see funding allocation as only an initial step.

“Shift the money to the poorer countries, and then, so what?” John Sauer, of the non-profit Water for People, asked IPS. “The challenge is then the capacity to spend that money and absorb it into district governments, the ones with the legal purview to make sure the water and sanitation issues get addressed.”

Friday’s meeting also shared plans on how to use existing resources better, once investments are made.

“If there is one water pump, it will break down pretty quickly,” WaterAid’s Northover said. “This often requires some level of institutional capability for financial management.”

Countries also described their commitments to make sanitation sustainable. The Dutch government, for instance, introduced a clause in some of its WASH agreements that any related foreign assistance must function for at least a decade. East Asian countries like Vietnam and Mongolia are creating investment packages that also help to rehabilitate and maintain existing WASH systems.

“This is probably one of the biggest meetings on WASH possibly ever, and what we mustn’t forget is that the 40 or 50 countries coming are making a commitment to do very tangible things that are measurable, UNICEF’s Wijesekera told IPS. “That bodes well for achieving longer-term goals of achieving universal access and equality.”

The open wounds of the Amazon. Credit:Rolly Valdivia/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

Indigenous leaders are warning of increased violence in the fight to save their dwindling forests and ecosystems from extractive companies.

Indigenous representatives and environmental activists from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas met over the weekend here to commemorate those leading community fights against extractive industries. The conference, called Chico Vive, honoured Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber-tapper killed in 1988 for fighting to save the Amazon.“Right now in our territory we can’t drink the water because it’s so contaminated from the hydrocarbons from the oil and gas industry." -- Chief Liz Logan of the Fort Nelson First Nation in BC, Canada

The gathering also recognised leaders who are continuing that legacy today.

“His struggle, to which he gave his life, did not end with his death – on the contrary,” John Knox, the United Nations independent expert on human rights and the environment, said at the conference. “But it continues to claim the lives of others who fight for human rights and environmental protection.”

A 2012 report by Global Witness, a watchdog and activist group, estimates that over 711 people – activists, journalists and community members – had been killed defending their land-based rights over the previous decade.

Those gathered at this weekend’s conference discussed not only those have been killed, injured or jailed. They also shared some success stories.

“In 2002, there was an Argentinean oil company trying to drill in our area. Some of our people opposed this, and they were thrown in jail,” Franco Viteri, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, told IPS.

“However, we fought their imprisonment and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in our favour. Thus, our town was able to reclaim the land and keep the oil company out.”

Motivated by oil exploration-related devastation in the north, Ecuadorian communities in the south are continuing to fight to defend their territory. Viteri says some communities have now been successful in doing so for a quarter-century.

But he cautions that this fight is not over, particularly as the Ecuadorian government flip-flops on its own policy stance.

“The discourse of [President Rafael] Correa is very environmentalist, but in a practical way it is totally false,” he says. “The government is taking the oil because they receive money from China, which needs oil.”

China has significantly increased its focus on Latin America in recent years. According to a briefing paper by Amazon Watch, a nonprofit that works to protect the rainforest and rights of its indigenous inhabitants, “in 2013 China bought nearly 90% of Ecuador’s oil and provided an estimated 61% of its external financing.”

The little dance

Many others at the conference had likewise already seen negative impacts due to extractives exploration and development in their community.

“We have oil and gas, mines, we have forestry, we have agriculture, and we have hydroelectric dams,” Chief Liz Logan of the Fort Nelson First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, told IPS.

“Right now in our territory we can’t drink the water because it’s so contaminated from the hydrocarbons from the oil and gas industry … The rates of cancer in our community are skyrocketing and we wonder why. But no one wants to look at this, because it might mean that what [extractives companies] are doing is affecting us and the animals.”

Logan described the work of protecting the community as a “little dance”: first they bring the government to court when they do not implement previous agreements, then they have to ensure that the government actually implements what the court orders.

Others discussed possible solutions to stop the destruction of ecosystems, and what is at stake for the communities living in them. The link between local land conflicts and global climate change consistently reappeared throughout many of the discussions.

“My community is made up of small-scale farmers and pastoralists who depend on cattle to live. For them, a cow is everything and to have the land to graze is everything,” said Godfrey Massay, an activist leader from the Land Rights Institute in Tanzania.

“These people are constantly threatened by large-scale investors who try to take away their land. But they are far more threatened by climate change, which is also affecting their livelihood.”

Andrew Miller of Amazon Watch described the case of the contentious Belo Monte dam in Brazil, which is currently under construction. Local communities oppose the dam because those upstream would be flooded and those downstream would suddenly find their river’s waters severely reduced.

“People are fighting battles on local levels, but they are also emblematic of global trends and they are also related to a lot of the climate things going on,” Miller told IPS. “[Hydroelectric] dams, for example, are sold as clean energy, but they generate a lot of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.”

According to Miller, one value of large gatherings such as this weekend’s conference is allowing participants to see the similarities between experiences and struggles around the world, despite often different cultural, political and environmental contexts.

“In each case there are things that are very specific to them,” Miller said. “But I think we are also going to see some trends in terms of governments and other actors cracking down and trying to limit the political space, the ability for these folks to be effective in their work and to have a broader impact on policy.”

Yet activists like Viteri, from Ecuador, remain determined to protect their land.

“We care for the forest as a living thing because it gives us everything – life, shade, food, water, agriculture,” Viteri said. “It also makes us rich, even if it is a different kind of richness. This is why we fight.”

Women march against the Dominican Republic's anti-abortion law in 2009. Credit: Elizabeth Eames Roebling/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Mar 26 2014 (IPS)

Lawmakers and civil society leaders from over 30 countries are calling for universal access to safe, legal abortion.

The declaration, released in Washington on Wednesday, comes in the context of a 20-year review by the United Nations of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. That landmark conference called for safe access to abortions in countries where the procedure was legal, while Wednesday’s declaration calls for the decriminalisation of abortion in all countries.“What we know now is that law changes social attitudes.” -- Nepali MP Arzu Rana Deuba

The declaration also anticipates the post-2015 development agenda. Advocates are calling to expand the discussion on women’s health to include abortion rights when determining the next round of global development goals, following the expiration of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs).

“True gender equality cannot be achieved without access to safe, legal abortion,” it says. “In the last two decades, roughly 1 million women and girls have died and more than 100 million have suffered injuries – many of them lifelong – due to complications from unsafe abortion.”

One of the MDGs, number five, does aim to reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio and to achieve universal access to reproductive health. However, it does not include access to safe abortions in its definition of access to reproductive health.

Advocates are now planning to formally offer these recommendations at a 20-year anniversary summit of the original ICPD. That event will take place in Addis Ababa next month.

“Looking ahead to ICPD+20 and the review of the Millennium Development Goals, the one goal they would not take was reproductive and sexual health for all,” Nafis Sadik, the special advisor to the executive director of UNAIDS and the former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, told IPS.

The new declaration targets not just the international development agenda but also U.S. policymakers.

Four-decade-old legislation here has restricted foreign assistance programmes from funding abortion-related procedures. Critics say the result is a disconnect between the work done by USAID, the country’s main foreign assistance arm, and the women’s health services offered.

“Regarding the problem of U.S. policy – it’s not just the financial support, but the moral leadership,” Sadik says. “It makes a big difference if the U.S. becomes restrictive in areas of support, if they restrict funding for any NGO that provides abortion.”

Cost-effective and feasible

The Airlie Declaration was composed following a two-day conference near Washington. It was written by representatives from over 30 countries, including health ministers, members of parliament, and medical leaders as well as advocates from the United Nations lawmakers and civil society.

“Our goal is to bring this message forward and build a broader coalition,” Elizabeth Maguire, the president of Ipas, an international NGO dedicated to ending preventable deaths and disabilities from unsafe abortions, told IPS. “Every participant is committed to pursuing action.”

Maguire led the recent conference as convenor.

One such participant is John Paul Bagala, president of the Federation of African Medical Students’ Associations. Bagala works in a hospital in northern Uganda that treated 480 women from cases of unsafe abortions in 2011-12 and another 500 in 2012-13.

According to Bagala, providing access to safe abortion is cost-effective. Treating injuries resulting from an illegal abortion in Uganda can cost more than 100 dollars, he says, while the cost of a safe abortion would be less than 10 dollars.

“As a medical student in Africa, we are taking a stand to disseminate the declaration in our respective institutions,” Bagala told IPS.

“To drive [out] stigma from our health workers when they are still in the training system, to ensure that the women, when they come for service, get the best service they need in terms of safety and quality. We are driving towards integrating the aspects of this declaration in terms of reproductive health rights into the curriculum of training health workers in Africa.”

Ipas’s Maguire likewise emphasises that providing universal access to reproductive health care is not just critical but “feasible.” In the case of Nepal, for instance, decriminalising abortion greatly increased women’s health and maternal mortality ratio.

“Nepal is one of the few countries that will be meeting MDG 5, and what the experts say is that it’s increased access to family planning, emergency obstetric care, and increased access to emergency abortion care,” Arzu Rana Deuba, a member of the Nepali Parliament, told IPS.

Deuba recounted the story of a young girl in Nepal who was jailed for 12 years after she was raped and unsuccessfully attempted an illegal abortion. The girl’s story gained international attention, and Nepal eventually decriminalised abortion in 2002.

“It’s a story of hope,” said Deuba. “After 2004, we had 1,500 skilled providers and 75 hospitals doing medical abortion services. As of 2014, 500,000 women have access to safe abortions, and that’s quite a lot for we are not a big country.”

She says Nepal’s success comes not just in the growth of medical services but in the country’s changing cultural attitudes toward abortion.

“What we know now is that law changes social attitudes,” Deuba said.

“I work at the community level and workers tell me there is no more stigma, that abortion is seen as part of women’s rights, that women are more vocal about abortion … it’s seen as part of the continuum of care. Now women don’t have to die anymore and there is a feeling of confidence and security among women.”