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	A central role for a civil society is the only way to guarantee inclusive post-2015 by Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council   May 2015   A central role for a civil society is the only way to guarantee inclusive post-2015 development goals   As the launch of the post-2015 development agenda approaches, a group of United Nations human rights experts call on UN member States to ensure that the new global goals are firmly grounded in international human rights norms and standards, including the principle of participation, and that they acknowledge the importance of a free and vibrant civil society for effective implementation.   In the midst of the global debate on the next set of development goals, targets and indicators, the experts emphasized that civil society plays an undeniably central role in the implementation of the development agenda. Civil society is integral in helping Governments find innovative solutions to complex developmental problems while oftentimes providing necessary public services.   A vibrant civil society also ensures that the voices of the vulnerable and marginalised are meaningfully included in the development initiatives that will affect their aspirations and well-being. But in order to undertake this role, civil society must be free to operate.”   “Civic space is shrinking worldwide, and there is therefore, a need to explicitly recognize the importance of a free and vibrant civil society”, the experts said. They cited a noticeable rise in attacks on civil society actors, a proliferation of laws that limit freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, growing restrictions on associations’ ability to access resources, an increase in bureaucratic harassment of civil society, politically motivated prosecutions of human rights defenders, violent dispersal of peaceful demonstrations and a surge in illicit surveillance of activists.   The experts also expressed grave concerns at a spike in the number of reports documenting physical assaults and killings of in particular environmental right defenders, social workers, women"s rights activists and other members of civil society promoting the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals.   “It is essential that the principle of partnership with civil society as well as the space for civil society to freely operate are at the heart of the post-2015 framework”, the experts said, noting the shift from the MDGs to a broad-based consultation process leading up to the post-2015 and the support of the UN Secretary-General, who unequivocally stated in his report “The Road to Dignity by 2030” that participatory democracy, free, safe and peaceful societies are both enablers and outcomes of development.   The experts noted that a human-rights based approach to the post-2015 goals requires a set of indicators measuring the extent to which enabling environments for civil society exist. They called upon member States to include such indicators as an indivisible component of the post-2015 framework. In this regard, the experts referred to OHCHR’s work on human rights indicators, including on developing indicators to measure the right to freedom of expression and the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association.   These freedoms are essential to the realisation of the entire new development agenda and are integral to Goal 16, on the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development and its target 16.10, to ensure public access to information and communication for all.. OHCHR’s work and the various multi-stakeholder and civil society initiatives to measure civic space and civil society participation should become an integral part of the discussions on indicators.   Civil society organizations can also play a critical role in collecting data on the most vulnerable or marginalised populations groups, often excluded from traditional statistical surveys conducted by national statistical offices. In conformity with international statistical standards, collaborations between national statistical offices and civil society organizations should be strengthened.   The experts took note of the Secretary-General’s call that all “financing streams need to be optimized towards sustainable development, and coordinated for the greatest impact.” “We take this encouraging message to mean that in the post-2015 framework there will no longer be any room for restrictions on civil society or associations to seek, receive and utilize resources so that they too may operate freely to fulfil their work” the experts said.   They added: "The shared post-2015 goals also entail and presuppose civil society"s ability to freely associate and cooperate worldwide, without any obstacles that hinder financial and material cooperation by and support for civil society across borders”.   When States convene in May 2015 to discuss a monitoring and review framework for the post-2015 development agenda, the experts urged that a prominent focus of the conversation be a people-centered sustainable development agenda that enables individuals, particularly those from the most marginalized communities, to participate freely in monitoring and review mechanisms. All civil society organizations, regardless of their status at the national and international level, should be regarded as equal partners and entitled to participate States should recognize the need to support efforts of developing the capacity of organizations representing the most marginalized groups, to enable them to influence on an equal basis.   The promise that no one be left behind cannot be met without full and free civil society participation throughout the post-2015 process, from negotiation of the goals, targets and indicators to the monitoring and review of measures to achieve them.   “Public participation in development and accountability will remain elusive without an active civil society of empowered women and men, young and old, who can exercise their rights in an enabling, supportive environment,” the experts said.   http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/SP/Pages/News.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/Pages/Post2015Development.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15505&LangID=E http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13063&LangID=E http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Development/Pages/PromotingHRbasedfinancialregulationmacroeconomicpolicies.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15592&LangID=E http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Development/Pages/NewsFeatureStoriesPromotingahumanrights.aspx Visit the related web page
	What does inequality mean for poor people? by Adriano Campolina ActionAid International   In Maranhao, Brazil, landless women organise to challenge the power of landlords who are illegally denying them access to the forests on which their livelihoods depend. Women in the Ugandan village of Kapchorwa come together not only to plan their farms and businesses but to plan how they will confront female genital mutilation (FGM), ensure that women are not restricted to the home, how they will hold the local authorities accountable for ensuring schools, health care centres, roads, and drinking water. In Tanzania, children’s clubs organise to fight child marriage. In Bangladesh, women garment workers demand safer conditions and decent pay. These are the heroes in the front line challenge to inequality. Their struggles will determine whether we end up with a world fit for us all.   A lot has been said recently about shocking statistics on inequality that show how wealth and power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a few. Those statistics grab public attention because they are powerful and useful. But they only tell part of the story. The most important, most troubling but also most hopeful story is the human story. That’s where we start. In ActionAid’s work with over five thousand communities across forty-five countries, we see the increasingly extreme inequality from the grassroots: how does it deepen poverty, and what are the solutions to tackle inequality from the bottom up? We also see from our work with local communities how inequality of power holds back justice and dignity and that any long term solution has to be based on changing power from below. And we see the vital connections between the different types of inequality - and the fundamental importance of taking a feminist approach to challenging it.   The inequality debate is littered with jargon such as "capture of the state" by elites. But the experiences behind these words are very real for poor and excluded people. When a community of landless people in my home country, Brazil, organises themselves to claim the right to land reform and access to land, next morning they usually find themselves opposed by the local judge, chief of police, mayor and others who are all deeply connected to the landlords. This means claiming their legal rights is much more tortuous and difficult than for those who are better off.   The same happens in countries across the world when the interests of one multinational company come together with the private or political interests of people in government, resulting in an explosion of land-grabs and evictions of poor farmers. ActionAid and many others have been challenging these by organising and mobilising from below. A small and isolated landless community is much more vulnerable to a land-grab, than a strong landless movement that can exert pressure and campaign for changes to land ownership laws and hold accountable those authorities that don’t fulfil their obligations.   In our experience, solutions to poverty and inequality depend on organising with the powerless in campaigning to shift power to people. In ActionAid our work in organising landless people goes hand in hand with our #LandFor campaign where we connect communities with national and international policy making. Only a broad coalition can curb the power of companies to take land. At the same time we promote positive alternatives, encouraging reform programs that increase the access of the poor to land.   Another example of the "capture of the state" is how public credit for entrepreneurs tends to be concentrated in larger investments for industrial scale agriculture, excluding the smallholder famers, women entrepreneurs associations and cooperatives. Once again it can take years of campaigning to challenge the unfair credit policies and create exclusive credit lines for small entrepreneurs.   In Uganda, for instance, a crucial part of ActionAid’s work has been mobilising smallholder women farmers so they can claim access to agricultural credit that otherwise would end in the bank accounts of large commercial farmers or companies.   A number of innovative public policies have been created to counter the trend of public resources being captured by the rich, for example the Brazilian Family Farmers credit (PRONAF) and the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). These are illustrations that show that rising inequality can be countered when powerless people are aware and organised.   There have been amazing victories and they point us to the path for change, but these efforts are not yet enough to realise change on the scale that poor and excluded people need. In fact, with inequalities of wealth and power heading in the wrong direction, it is time to ask ourselves serious questions.   So what else is missing in the fight against inequality? We should look beyond inequality of wealth to inequality of power, recognising that there are many other forces at work that create discrimination. Missing from the debate have been the power forces that underlie gender discrimination, such as the rising burden of women’s unpaid care work, the lack of women’s access to public services and the increasing tide of violence against women.   Again, to address this we need to connect local awareness-raising with campaigning at all levels - and this combination has proved effective in helping women to claim better public services and effective action by local authorities to reduce violence against women. Challenging inequality starts with bringing the powerless together, supporting their local action, organising women groups and supporting women’s movements - which is then reinforced by our Safe Cities for Women campaign.   Education is a crucial sector as it can be the most powerful equalising force in a society. We organise and mobilise parents, children, teachers and community leaders to develop school improvement plans and citizens’ reports on the state of education, leading to national campaigns for change in countries such as Nepal, Ghana, Mozambique and Malawi.   But to secure more resources for long term investment in education requires coordinated action at national and international level to expand the tax base, for example challenging harmful tax incentives and aggressive tax avoidance by multinational companies. Our #taxpower campaign mobilises people to make the connections between fair taxation and progressive spending - both essential in helping reduce inequality.   Striking global statistics tell us a lot about inequality. A huge task ahead is to ground this debate at a local level - and crucially to explore the most effective actions that can be taken by governments and by society at national and international level that can seriously redress power imbalances. There is a wealth of solid experiences that are successful and repeatable. It is time now for us to ground the debate in practical experiences and move from the diagnosis of the problem to concrete people-led solutions.   Civil society is beginning to come together in addressing the problem and build the movement needed to fight the drivers of inequality, so that we can realise the rights of the poor and marginalised on a larger scale.   Recently, ActionAid has convened a new group, united under the banner #fightinequality that brings together human rights, faith, environmentalists, feminist groups and trade unions in a common cause. It is rooted in strengthening the power of the people to challenge the people in power. At the local level, people are not at all surprised by the shocking numbers on inequality - they are already working to fight it. Let us all get on their side. Visit the related web page
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