International's Demand Dignity campaign
"Whats that??
Explanation follows.
So firstly and very simply the Demand Dignity campaign believes that Human Rights = Less Poverty.
Within the Demand Dignity Campaign we are focusing on largely 3 areas:
1. Slums
Right to adequate housing
High levels of insecurity
Lack of access to basic services
Forced evictions without warning
2. Maternal Mortality
The right to safe motherhood
Equal access of women to emergency obstetric services
Accurate data: make the problem visible
Accountability: political, legal, practical, local
Participative rights: responding to the voices of poor women
3. Corporate Accountability
Global rules on corporate responsibility for human rights: duties beyond borders
Robust human rights safeguards and transparency measures by extractive industry companies in their operations.
Participative rights, listening to local communities
This is a campaign where we aim to change the debate on poverty. And we want your voices to frame this debate. So I urge you to write about any of these issues that you see in your own area, city or country. Anything at all that will force governments to look at poverty as a human rights issue.
You can read more about the campaign here - http://demanddignity.amnesty.org/en-gb/campaign/about-demand-dignity
Human Rights = Less Poverty
The global economic crisis is driving millions more people into poverty and placing them at increased risk of human rights violations such as food insecurity or forced eviction. The world urgently needs a different kind of response and a different kind of leadership if we are to reverse this dramatic escalation of human misery.
This is a human rights crisis. Billions of people are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity around the world. The solution can only be found through a coordinated and concerted response rooted in human rights and the rule of law. This requires strong leadership.
Amnesty International’s Demand Dignity campaign aims to end global poverty by working to strengthen recognition and protection of the rights of the poor. The campaign will demand the leadership, accountability and transparency that are essential to end the human rights violations that keep people poor.
This is a campaign about all rights. It is the combined abuse of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights that drives and deepens poverty. By demanding dignity we are demanding that all states adopt and implement the laws, policies and practices that will end deprivation, insecurity, exclusion, and voicelessness.
Participation and involvement in the decisions that impact on our lives are essential to human rights. By including all rights holders in policy making governments are at once creating a framework for accountability, transparency, inclusion and empowerment. These are the prerequisites to ending poverty.
The Demand Dignity Campaign will put rights at the centre of poverty eradication, and make rights protection efforts work for all people. The stories and solutions that people living in poverty have to tell will be the centrepiece of this worldwide mobilisation. Together we will amplify their voices and demand effective responses from political leaders.
Global demand to the superpowers
The two superpowers, the United States and China, both accept only part of the human rights agenda relevant to ending poverty. China has ratified the major treaty reaffirming economic, social and cultural rights, but not the treaty covering civil and political rights, and the US the reverse. The decision not to ratify in both cases is deliberate and has ramifications that extend well beyond their national jurisdictions.
US failure to embrace economic, social and cultural rights results directly in a domestic health system that skews maternal health care away from the poorest communities. The US is the only country that votes against the right to food resolution annually in the UN. The ‘global gag rule’, removed by President Obama this year, had profoundly negative implications for women’s rights in Africa.
The Uyghur community and other minority groups in China face repression of their civil and political rights. China’s indifference facilitates the Cambodian government’s practice of widespread forced evictions, and provides the cover that sustains human rights violations in Sudan and Ethiopia.
This global and local mockery of human rights by the G2 is perhaps the most potent and urgent example of how global leadership must change. Amnesty International is calling on the government of China to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and on the US government to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By holding the superpowers to account we are starting at the top, demanding a new kind of leadership to end poverty, demanding dignity.
Global calls
We have selected three initial calls to focus the Demand Dignity campaign on egregious concerns, illustrating that human rights are a solution to poverty. By focussing on these issues we seek to highlight how a combined campaign for accountability, access and active participation can end poverty.
What does Living in Dignity mean to you?
Maternal Mortality
Discrimination underpins and exacerbates poverty. Gender-based violence and exclusion are all-too-common contexts in which discrimination keeps people poor and makes them poorer. Maternal mortality, with one woman dying needlessly every minute, is perhaps the most compelling illustration of how violations of women’s rights are both a cause and consequence of poverty. Involving and enabling women in the decisions that affect their lives, giving them the information and power needed to make decisions on their own reproductive rights, and providing them with the health care they need are all essential to ending maternal mortality.
Slums
Over one billion people live in slums around the world. Poverty is chief among the factors that contribute to the enormous numbers of people living in slums. People living in informal settlements are generally denied their right to adequate housing and other essential services including schools and hospitals. Slum dwellers are usually excluded from decision-making processes that impact on their lives and rarely enjoy full legal protection. The lack of security of tenure and widespread forced evictions sustain and deepen poverty and deprivation among slum dwellers. As an initial step to address the exclusion and deprivation faced by those living in slums, Amnesty International is campaigning for an end to forced evictions.
Corporate Accountability
The abuse of human rights by corporations engaged in the extractives industry has a disproportion and often discriminatory impact on the poor. Extractives projects cause environmental degradation and have other impacts on the right to land and livelihoods in ways that have long-term and irreparable negative consequences. Communities are often excluded from decision making. Through the Demand Dignity Campaign we will be calling for the protection of affected rights holders in specific country situations. We will also be campaigning for G20 countries to adopt strict rules to regulate companies’ operations at home and abroad.
Making Rights Law
When the economic, social and cultural rights of people living in poverty are violated, they in particular face difficulties in accessing justice. Their rights must be protected, respected and fulfilled nationally and internationally.
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