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	Threats to Civil Society are rising Fast by World Organisation Against Torture & agencies   Berlin, 19 December 2012   Russian Federation: International NGOs call for end to Russian crack-down on civil society.   On the eve of the European Union-Russia summit this week, eight international organisations representing a cross-section of global civil society call on European Union leaders to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the crackdown on Russian civil society.   Russia has passed a series of laws that restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly significantly hindering the operation of national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as international NGOs supporting them. The laws have created a difficult environment for civil society in Russia where activists now face significant risks in carrying out their work.   Amnesty International, CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Freedom House, Front Line Defenders, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (a joint programme of the World Organisation Against Torture [OMCT] and the International Federation for Human Rights [FIDH]) and Transparency International urge the summit participants to seek a commitment from the Russian government to ensure the involvement of civil society in public policy debates, stop harassment of human rights organisations, and increase protection for civil society activists and journalists.   We call for the repeal of recently adopted laws that contain provisions inconsistent with Russia’s international and constitutional commitments on human rights and good governance. These include:   Non-profit and non-government organisations receiving funds from foreign organisations must now register with a special governmental agency and publicly identify themselves as “foreign agents” – a pejorative label signifying spy and traitor – if they engage in so called “political activities”, which include advocacy and influencing public opinion. Such organisations must also put “foreign agent” on all publications. Failure to respect the provisions can be punished by a prison sentence.   A new, broad legal definition of “treason” could potentially criminalise human rights and political activism.   Exorbitantly high penalties of up to $32,000 have been introduced for violating restrictive rules on public protests creating a chilling effect on the right to peaceful assembly.   The government now has the power to shut down websites without a court order if they are considered to be publishing “prohibited” information, a term that is not clearly defined. This could curb freedom of expression and increase internet censorship.   Libel is once again a criminal offence, punishable by increased fines of up to $61,000, which is likely to inhibit criticism by the media and NGOs of public officials and policies.   We believe the new restrictive laws, particularly the definition of treason, could threaten Russia’s membership inthe Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), its accession to the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials and its relationship with the European Court of Human Rights.   We call on the European Union to join us in urging the Russian government to bring its laws into line with Russia’s international obligations and rights guaranteed under the Russian Constitution, repeal restrictive new laws and guarantee a safe environment for civil society.   http://www.omct.org/human-rights-defenders/urgent-interventions/russia/2012/12/d22098/   Dec 2012   Threats to Civil Society are rising Fast, by Frank Vogl.   Many of my friends leading human rights and anti-corruption organizations from Bahrain to Zimbabwe face rising threats from national governments and their security forces. The vice is tightening in one country after another on activists for human rights, political reform, freedom of speech, and anti-corruption.   The decrees announced by President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt now risk the undermining of legal rights and due process and will, almost assuredly, raise fears among the civil society activists who have worked so hard over the last two years to build real freedom and democracy in their country.   Meanwhile, on Nov. 21, a new law took effect in Russia that calls on all non-governmental organizations that receive foreign funding to register as "agents of foreign influence." Most effected will be NGOs campaigning for human rights, for fair elections and democracy, and against corruption. Moreover, Russia"s Duma recently also approved law, aimed at the same NGOs that provides the authorities with a broad base from which to charge them with high treason, which could be punishable by 12 to 20 years of imprisonment.   Just as we are seeing crackdowns in Russia, so fears are solidly grounded that other governments in the former Soviet empire may follow Moscow"s lead. Then, the latest actions in Egypt highlight the harsh fact that the great hope that the "Arab Spring" would see the growth of civil society across the Middle East is now, quite possibly, also fading. New regimes are tightening the screws, sometimes banning NGOs with foreign funding, and/or increasing controls on the media.   Indeed, we are seeing rising threats, or actual restrictions in rising numbers of countries that impose barriers on NGO operations, freedom of speech, advocacy, communications, movement and assembly.   Moreover, NGOs are finding the bar rising on their ability to raise funds. USAID was recently forced to close its operations in Russia, for example.   Meeting in Brazil, two weeks ago, representatives from over 100 national chapters of the global Transparency International anti-corruption movement exchanged chilling stories of personal experiences in the face of corrupt governments. They agreed to approve a resolution that stressed that, "Restricting the capacity of civil society organizations to operate violates the fundamental human rights of freedom of association and assembly, and curbs the right of free expression. Civil society organizations play an essential role in the fight against corruption as they are best suited to give a voice to the victims."   The Western media reports on new specific cases of restrictions on civil society but the impact of most of these news stories is marginal on the ruthless governments quashing civil rights and undermining social justice. Then, Western governments protest individual incidents as they arise, but rarely are the protests more than what amounts to the exchange of gentle diplomatic statements of concern. The ruthless governments are not impressed.   In September, the The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law published a report that provided hosts of examples of murders and jailings of civil society leaders.   The report noted, for example: In September 2009, Yevgeny Zhovtis, Kazakhstani human rights activist and member of the World Movement Steering Committee, received a four-year imprisonment sentence as a result of a politically manipulated trial related to an auto accident. In December 2009, Chinese dissident and principal author of "Charter "08" and Nobel Laureate, Liu Xiaobo, was convicted of "inciting subversion of state power" and sentenced to 11 years in prison. In June 2010, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, a pioneer of human rights movements across Africa, was killed, along with his driver, after being called to meet the Inspector General of Police. Bahraini human rights activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, was arrested in December 2011 and sentenced to life imprisonment forparticipating in "OccupyBudaiya Street," an initiative organized by protesters in Bahrain through Facebook and Twitter.   Many civil society activists around the world fall victim to similar oppression every day."   Meanwhile, my friends in the Transparency International movement are facing an increasingly perilous situation in many countries, from having their computers routinely hacked, to receiving threatening telephone calls in the middle of the night, to being picked up by the police for interrogations.   One friend in Asia had his office bombed, another in Latin America recently found a bomb under his car. Nevertheless, these activists continue their vital work, attracting ever greater public interest and support. Indeed, it is their very success that makes the authorities increasingly insecure and which is now prompting a most dangerous response. Visit the related web page
	Changing The Rules by Alnoor Ladha, Thomas Pogge, Firoze Manji   Our world has never been more connected or more prosperous than it is today. Yet right now, one in every three of us alive today does not have access to the most basic needs for a decent life - food, education, medical care, a safe environment.   The good news is that for the first time, ordinary citizens like you and I have the power and ability to change the rules that are creating these injustices. Technology and the shift of global power mean that we can now demand our say in decisions that have traditionally been made by elites behind closed doors. But the truth is, these things will only change if we demand it.   If we work together, the voices of the world"s majority are too loud to be silenced. Change the rules, and we change the world.   We operate as a decentralised network with several campaign hubs around the world, including in Johannesburg, Mumbai, New York and Rio. The focus of these hubs is to identify issues, opportunities and regional strategies for each campaign.   Our campaigns are for viable, alternative rules that serve the interests of the world’s majority, with disproportionate benefit to the poor, vulnerable and marginalised among us. In recent years, we saw dictatorships toppled across North Africa and the Middle East. There was hope that nations could chart a common course to tackle climate change. We seemed on the verge of reining in the unchecked greed of the banking system. Back in 2008, America surprised the world by electing a black president to the White House.   Yet cynicism can so quickly fill the space where hope had bloomed. In nations where dictators were toppled, old elites reassert their power. Today, while the warming oceans rise, even the prospect of a global climate plan is beyond the horizon. While there are fewer banks now, they are richer and more powerful than ever before. A black president has been re-elected, but financial elites have never had more of a stranglehold on American priorities.   The greatest hope for progress on such vast challenges is in the democratic impulse now taking shape in many nations. Coordinated movements of ordinary citizens have emerged as a major force from Tahrir Square to Wall Street. Across the world we are seeing millions of ordinary people joining citizen-powered movements, determined to overwhelm the power of entrenched elites.   They are harnessing new technologies and social networks and seeing themselves as the agents of change. These movements are still half-formed and often flawed, but they are getting stronger.   The challenge now is for these new movements to grow, to work together and to focus their energies. Lasting change requires more than overthrowing a dictator or firing a few CEOs. It requires changing the rules themselves - the national and international laws, policies and practices that allow injustices to endure while regimes rise and fall.   The rules as they stand today have created a world in which inequality is vast and growing. The world"s 1,226 billionaires have more combined wealth than 3.5 billion people - half the entire planet"s population. The richest 10 per cent of the world"s population takes 90 per cent of the world"s income.   The scale of inequality and poverty can appear overwhelming and unchangeable. Yet it is not inevitable. It is the outcome of active choices by people who make and enforce the rules we all live by: rules about global trade, banking, loans, investment, taxes, working conditions, land, food, health and education. These rules are made by people and people can change them.   Frederick Douglass, a leader of the 19th century abolitionist movement which brought an end to slavery, once said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand". If we want to change rules that have been written by the few and for the few, we must look outside existing power structures to the power of the many. We know from history that when people demand their rights, they can move mountains and change whole systems.   Right now, there is a special moment of opportunity. Throughout the world, citizens have access to information in ways once unimaginable. Affordable technologies are revolutionising our ability to communicate with one another and act collectively. The opportunities for new citizen-powered movements to become catalysts for change have never been greater than today. Powerful elites are losing the structural advantages they once enjoyed of being able to maintain secrecy, restrict information and suppress popular movements.   This month, we are launching a new platform called The Rules, to help mobilise action by ordinary citizens around the world to challenge and change the rules - the most basic drivers of inequality and poverty.   We have a special focus on organising with people and grassroots movements in countries such as Brazil, India, Kenya and South Africa. We are creating new ways for people to speak up using simple, cheap technologies like basic mobile phones.The opportunities for new citizen-powered movements to become catalysts for change have never been greater than today.   The first campaign for The Rules will target the system of offshore tax havens, starting with one of the biggest and most connected of all, the City of London.   Tax havens are the product of rules that have been rigged by powerful corporations, lobbyists, lawyers, bankers, accountants and government officials.   They are allowing a tiny global elite to extract trillions of dollars from rich and poor countries alike, starving our nations treasuries and choking off funds essential for schools, medicines, social programmes and infrastructure.   New research has blown the lid on this secretive shadow economy, with at least $21 trillion estimated to have been stowed away in these tax havens - 10 per cent of all the world"s privately held wealth.   This is also more than 10 times the total value of development aid given to the world"s poorer nations in the past 20 years. The few who benefit from these rigged rules will fight long and hard to preserve them, but they can be defeated.   Rules express and entrench much of the injustice in our world today. But rules can be changed and the opportunity to make those changes has never been greater. Instruments of power once only in the hands of elites are now available to ordinary citizens - and we are beginning to use them. That gives us reason for hope.   * This article was written by the founding members of The Rules. View a video featuring Thomas Pogge argueing for a new global institutional commitment to the swift and complete eradication of severe poverty:   http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/ending-poverty   Tax Justice Network: http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcatart=2&lang=1   Apr 2013   The truth about extreme global inequality, by Jason Hickel.   The crisis of capital, the rise of the Occupy movement and the crash of Southern Europe have brought the problem of income inequality into mainstream consciousness in the West for the first time in many decades. Now everyone is talking about how the richest 1 percent have captured such a disproportionate share of wealth in their respective countries. This point came crashing home once again when an animated video, illustrating wealth disparities in the US, went viral last month. When an infographic catches the attention of tens of millions of internet users, you know it is hitting a nerve.   But the global scale of inequality remains largely absent from this story. So we at /The Rules decided to put together a video that would give it some attention.   While this information is not new, it is still startling. In the video we say that the richest 300 people on earth have more wealth than the poorest 3bn - almost half the world"s population. We chose those numbers because it makes for a clear and memorable comparison, but in truth the situation is even worse: the richest 200 people have about $2.7 trillion, which is more than the poorest 3.5bn people, who have only $2.2 trillion combined. It is very difficult to wrap one"s mind around such extreme figures.   But we wanted to do more than just illustrate the brutal extent of inequality; we also wanted to demonstrate that it has been getting progressively worse. A recent Oxfam report shows that "the richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years, with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process", while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth.   The video shows how this widening disparity operates between countries. During the colonial period, the gap between the richest countries and the poorest countries widened from 3:1 to 35:1, in part because European powers extracted so much wealth from the Global South in the form of resources and labour. Since then, that gap has grown to almost 80:1. How is this possible?   Capital flows from poor to rich   The gap is growing in part because of the neoliberal economic policies that international institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have imposed on developing countries over the past few decades. These policies are designed to forcibly liberalise markets, prying them open in order to give multinational corporations unprecedented access to cheap land, resources and labour. But at a serious cost: poor countries have lost around $500bn per year in GDP as a consequence of these policies, according to economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts.   As a result we see a clear net flow of wealth from poor places to rich places. We designed the video to help people visualise this flow, and to show how it pumps up the Global North at devastating expense to the Global South.   Governments of rich countries celebrate how much they spend in aid to developing countries, and multinational corporations splash CSR credentials across annual reports and product lines - neither of them confess how much they take out of developing countries.   The video highlights the fact that aid disbursements from rich to poor pale in comparison to the amount of capital that flows the other direction. Tax avoidance alone accounts for more than $900bn each year - money that corporations steal from developing countries and hide in tax havens (or thiefdoms, more accurately), of which the City of London is the global hub.   Debt service accounts for about $600bn each year, much of it paid on the compound interest of illegitimate loans accumulated by dictators long since deposed. Both of these flows can be understood as direct transfusions of cash from poor to rich.   There is much more that we could have included in the video. Land grabs, for example: Fred Pearce"s new book, The Land Grabbers, shows that land exceeding the size of Western Europe has been grabbed from developing countries by corporations in the past decade alone. If we could quantify the value of that land, we could have added a huge amount to the $2 trillion stack of cash that the video depicts flowing from poor to rich.   Or consider climate change: A 2 degree rise in global temperature will cost regions like Africa and South Asia about 5 percent of their GDP, much more than rich countries will suffer despite the fact that they bear most of the responsibility for causing this disaster. Losses on this level make aid seem insignificant.   These are the ultimate drivers of poverty and inequality. These are the problems that we need to tackle.   Democratic deficit   It bears pointing out that the geographic divide that the video depicts between the Global North and the Global South does not make as much sense today as it once did. We tried to show how both China and Russia embody this divide within their borders. But to be even more accurate we would have had to depict a small wealthy core of corporations and individuals - a global elite versus the majority of the world"s people. It is no longer only about the West versus the Rest; the class divide is now internationally dispersed.   It remains true that the institutions that control the global economy (the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and various bilateral Free Trade Agreements, or FTAs) are monopolised by Western countries. But that does not mean that they represent the interests of voters in those countries, for the people who run these institutions - central bankers, trade representatives and their corporate lobbyists - are not elected by any democratic process.   The World Bank and the IMF have the power to impose economic policies on developing countries even when voters and elected politicians in those countries unanimously reject them. On top of this, they enjoy "sovereign immunity" status that protects them from lawsuit when their loans fail and their policies cause economic crisis and human devastation.   In other words, not only are these institutions undemocratic, they also trump local democracies and override the will of voters in independent nations. The people affected have no recourse to justice.   We see the same democratic deficit in corporations. The majority of the world"s biggest economic entities are now corporations, not countries. They are run by CEOs who are unelected and unaccountable to any citizens; they are responsible only to their shareholders, and their mandate is to turn as much profit as possible at whatever cost to human life or the planet.   These corporations often have more power than the governments of the countries in which they operate. One reason for this is that the WTO and most FTAs enforce "investor-state dispute agreements" that allow corporations to sue local governments for legislation that compromises their profits, like minimum wage laws or pollution laws.   We need to change the rules   The point here is that corporate power regularly transcends national sovereignty. We have to face the fact that the democratic institutions we worked so hard to shore up during the 20th century are no longer sufficient to protect us in this brave new world.   We need to change the rules, and we need to do it quickly. Given that real power is now routinely wielded at the supra-national level, we need to start building global democratic capacity that can keep rampant greed and profiteering in check.   This might mean a global corporate minimum tax that will put an end to trade mispricing and tax havens. It might mean a global minimum wage that will put a floor on the "race to the bottom" for labour. It will certainly mean wresting control of international trade laws from the hands of IMF bankers and WTO technocrats and placing it under new institutions that are transparent and democratic.   If we are going to have a global economy, we need to have global democratic oversight. Can we accomplish this? Yes. And anyhow, we have no choice; the future of humanity, and of the planet, depends on it. They will say we are dreamers for demanding these changes. But the dreamers are those who imagine that we can feasibly carry on with the status quo.   * Dr Jason Hickel lectures at the London School of Economics, he is an advisor to The Rules. http://www.therules.org/en http://www.therules.org/en/the-issues   U.S. Inequality: http://mashable.com/2013/03/02/wealth-inequality/ Visit the related web page
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