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	Civil Liberties Groups from 10 Countries launch Coalition to reshape Human Rights Landscape by The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)   October 2013   In response to increasing restrictions on personal freedoms and civil protest, national human rights organizations from 10 countries this week launched the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO). They also released “Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World,” a collection of case studies showing patterns of police crackdown and abuse against peaceful assembly, accompanied by concrete recommendations to expand free speech.   "Fundamental rights and freedoms we enjoy are a direct result of protest movements of the past,” said Gastón Chillier, executive director of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales in Argentina. “Freedom of speech and as a result, our societies, will only flourish if peaceful assembly is protected from excessive police force and government obstruction.”   The INCLO investigation and report bring together examples of protest under attack in which INCLO members are involved. The report offers three primary recommendations for governments to advance freedom of speech: increase regulation of less-lethal weapons (tear gas, pepper spray), explicitly affirm support for freedom of peaceful assembly, and be vigilant against administrative limitations to protest.   “Member organizations will work together to counter the efforts to repress political speech,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “Only when citizens can voice their concerns and advocate openly for positive change can democracy flourish.”   INCLO will eventually have an international Secretariat based in Geneva and lobby governments as well as intergovernmental organizations. INCLO member organizations will collaborate on a bilateral and multilateral basis. The network’s initial priorities will be police accountability and social protest, religious freedom and equal treatment, and informational rights.   Current members are the ACLU, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Argentina), the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, the Legal Resources Centre (South Africa), Liberty (United Kingdom) and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, see link below for more details. http://www.aclu.org/ Visit the related web page
	Budapest Water Summit: Fighting the Corporate Agenda by Meera Karunananthan, Satoko Kishimoto   Oct 2013   Water scarcity by 2030: For every second person on earth, UN says.   About a half of the global population could be facing water shortages by 2030 when demand would exceed water supply by 40 percent, says United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.   Opening the Water Summit in Budapest, Hungary on Tuesday, the UN chief warned against unsustainable use of water resources.   “Water is wasted and poorly used by all sectors in all countries. That means all sectors in all countries must cooperate for sustainable solutions. We must use what we have more equitably and wisely,” Ban said.   “By 2030 nearly half the global population could be facing water scarcity. Demand could outstrip supply by 40 per cent.”   Governments cannot cope with the problem on their own, without the “full engagement” of all other players, including business, Ban said.   Agriculture remains the largest consumer of freshwater. “There is growing urgency to reconcile its demands with the needs of domestic and industrial uses, especially energy production,” the UN Secretary General said.   He urged large scale growers as well as small farmers to learn to get “more crop per drop” by using advanced irrigation technologies and focusing on “climate-resilient” rather than water intensive crops.   Climate change adds to the risk of water shortages in large parts of the world and that is another challenge that nations should cooperate on.   “We must make sure that water remains a catalyst for cooperation not conflict among communities and countries,” Ban stressed.   Global warming means not only more droughts, but also more floods.   “That is why we must do everything we can to keep global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” the UN chief said.   In 2000, world leaders adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) including a committment to halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.   “While the MDG target for providing access to improved water sources has been reached (a figure in dispute), at least 780 million people lack this basic necessity”. “Roughly 80 per cent of global wastewater from human settlements or industrial sources is discharged untreated. Water quality in at least parts of most major river systems still fails to meet basic World Health Organization standards.”   About one-third of people on the planet drink water that is dangerous for health, while even a larger part of population lack adequate sanitation, according to the UN chief.   “Some 2.5 billion people lack the dignity and health offered by access to a safe, decent toilet and protection from untreated waste. One billion people practice open defecation.”   Such unsanitary practices, common in many developing countries, are considered among the main causes of diarrhea – the second biggest killer of children in the world after pneumonia.   “Even when it does not kill, repeated diarrhea can cause childhood stunting. These children are more vulnerable to disease and their brains do not develop as they should”.   Investment in sanitation is a down-payment on a sustainable future, with economists estimating that every dollar spent can bring a five-fold return.   “Our societies cannot prosper without clean, plentiful freshwater. People cannot thrive without adequate sanitation.”   According to the United Nations, Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number of water-stressed countries of any region.   October 2013   Fighting the Corporate Water Agenda, by Meera Karunananthan.   I am at the Budapest Water Summit this week working with friends from Public Services International, KruHa Indonesia, Food and Water Europe and IBON. The Budapest Water Summit is yet another UN event dominated by the corporate policy agenda. It features an exhibition where UN agencies display their information alongside corporations -- like Veolia and Nestle -- that are peddling the latest profit-making schemes as solutions to the environmental and economic crises. One panelist summed up the general tone of the summit in this morning"s plenary session when he said, "water is everybody"s business."   Another panelist, Andre LaPierre of the Global Environment Fund, claimed, "we all agree private sector involvement is good for everyone." Perhaps he hasn"t heard that people around the world are taking to the streets demanding that water and sanitation services be controlled by communities and not corporations. In fact, Budapest recently terminated its contract with Suez Environment and RWE, renationalizing its municipal water services after many years of dissatisfaction with inadequate services. And Budapest was not the first Hungarian city to do so. In 2009, the city of Pecs annulled its contract after determining that price hikes had violated the public interest.   Gabriella Zanzanaini of Food & Water Europe and I attended an interactive session targeting youth which was facilitated by the Global Water Partnership -- an international network comprised of both public institutions and private corporations. Young people were asked to deliberate on which factors should be considered when determining water prices, and why it is that water isn"t valued within the global economy like gold and silver. We wound up in small discussion groups where Gabriella and I encouraged our fellow participants to see how the very framing of these questions reinforced a pro-corporate ideology, treating water as a commodity that can be bought and sold.   At our own event promoting a water justice perspective on the implementation of the human right to water, we dispelled the myth that the private sector would bring silver bullet solutions to the global water crisis.   The real crisis is a political one: corporations are attempting to control water policy to guarantee secure access to scarce water resources. When governments relegate basic services, such as water and sanitation, to profit-driven multinationals that hike up the service fees and exploit scarce resources, we are dealing with a crisis generated by an unsustainable economic model.   Yet that model continues to be promoted around the world at events like the Budapest Water Summit, where governments discuss the future of the world"s water with polluters and water profiteers rather than with the communities most impacted by the global water crisis.   * Meera Karunananthan is the national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians.   October 16, 2013   Budapest Water Summit ‘Mirage’ of participation, by Satoko Kishimoto.   It had been billed as a summit to push for universal access to water, but attending the Budapest Water Summit held last week felt like grasping at a mirage of water in a desert. The slogans and appearance were attractive, but held no prospect of delivering the human right to water for all. Behind the mirage lay the same corporate players and market-driven processes that continue to deny access to the world’s most critical resource to millions of people.   The mirage was evident firstly in the process. The conference constantly emphasized its participatory nature, encouraging different stakeholders to produce recommendations for the Budapest Water Summit statement that could also act as a basis for governments’ commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (due to replace the Millennium Development Goals in 2016). But this façade of consultation merely hid the real drivers of discussions and debates.   For a start the conference was hosted by the Hungarian government partnering not only with the neoliberal thinktank the World Water Council, but also with controversial companies like Nestle and CocaCola who are notorious for their unsustainable use of water that has deprived poor communities as a result.   In discussion after discussion, those who chaired or facilitated sessions were themselves responsible for policies and practices that have excluded peoples’ access to water. The Youth Forum and the civil society forum’s discussions on pricing of water, for example, were facilitated by Global Water Partnerships (GWP), led by the World Bank. This multilateral institution’s record is controversial, given the role they played in enforcing failed privatization projects around the world. The failure of their approach - that has led to a wave of communities taking privatized water firms back into public hands - did not seem to affect the World Bank’s faith and advocacy that water prices are most efficiently determined by "the market".   Similarly, the governance session during the civil society forum was chaired by the "NGO" Oieau, established by French water multinationals Suez and Veolia. Suez is currently accused by civil society groups in Jakarta of bullying local authorities; In Barcelona Suez doesn’t even operate with a proper contract. None of the organizers, it seemed, appeared to question why companies that have been constantly ejected from communities for price-hikes and profiteering, might not be considered the best facilitators for discussions of governance.   The topics on the conference agenda - universal access to water and sanitation, integrated resources management, water-energy-food nexus, water governance, “green economy”, and financing water and sanitation – also obscured real discussions about power: about those profiting and those excluded from decisions around water.   The results were a fuzzy and slippery debate. Discussions about water governance, for instance, failed to focus on the obligations of governments to regulate polluting and water- grabbing companies and the obligation of public authorities to ensure access to water for all. Instead discussions centered around "innovative" approaches such as partnerships between multi-stakeholders (to find joint solutions) and a discourse of “green economy”, which is about letting markets decide the most efficient allocation of water resources.   In discussions about water scarcity, only solutions involving new technologies, large investments and new market opportunities seemed to be considered relevant. Locally-managed, low-cost solutions got far less attention than they deserve. There was far more interest in talking about how much corporations can contribute to cleaning up polluted water to re-use, rather than how to make industry stop polluting water in the first place.   I worked closely with other water justice activists from groups likes Blue Planet Project, Food and Water Europe, Public Services International and the Indonesian NGO coalition Kruha, to constantly make critical interventions in different sessions.   To counter a narrative that leaves water decisions to the market – and therefore to the powerful companies that are motivated by profit rather than the human right to water – we argued that water tariffs should be determined democratically. It is a political decision how to finance water provision. As water is life and right to access to water can not be denied, we proposed public policies such as progressive tariff structures with cross subsidization and taxation as the keys to finance water provision. We argued that “multi-stakeholder participation” - a popular narrative in the conference – are invariably designed by actors who hold power.   Ultimately our experience of working with communities worldwide seeking to reclaim control of public water showed that summits like Budapest are the opposite of democratic participation in decision making. These communities struggling for control of water, often against corporations, were noticeably absent from the plush conference surroundings in Budapest. However it is these communities – rather than markets or fuzzy multi-stakeholder events – that need to be leading the discussions on choice of technology, priority of investments and allocation of water. Until that happens, we will continue to grasp at mirages.   * Satoko Kishimoto coordinates the Reclaiming Public Water (RPW) Network that advocates progressive public water reforms and Public-Public Partnerships as the key elements for solving the global crisis in access to clean water and sanitation.   http://www.canadians.org/righttowater http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/WaterAndSanitation/SRWater/Pages/SRWaterIndex.aspx http://www.right2water.eu/news/un-special-rapporteur-welcomes-eci-water-and-sanitation-are-human-right http://www.righttowater.info/catarina-de-albuquerque/ http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Water/eliminatingsheetPost2015.pdf http://www.trust.org/item/20131114080031-qurp7/?source=hpblogs http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/11/arab-world-faces-alarming-water-crisis-warns-undp/
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