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	World Day for Decent Work by International Trade Union Confederation   Brussels, 06 October 2008   Trade Unions in more than 100 Countries to mobilise to transform the world economy, on October 7, World Day for Decent Work.   From Fiji across the globe to Alaska, workers are mobilising today to demand change in the world economy, as the financial crisis threatens the livelihoods of millions upon millions of people worldwide. Working people have had enough of policies which have delivered vast wealth to a tiny few, who have profited from lax or non-existent regulation of financial markets, while those who actually produce the goods and services of the real economy have seen their wages stagnate or fall.   The ITUC’s Founding Congress in 2006 launched the call for this world day of action, to demand a fundamental transformation of globalisation, ending the policies of free market neo-liberalism which have brought us to the very edge of a catastrophic global recession. The time for that change is now”, said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder.   The day will start with a gathering of young trade unionists in Fiji, following which rallies, demonstrations, educational, cultural and media events will be taking place in more than 500 cities, towns and villages across the planet, ending as the eastern-most activity of the day comes to a close in Alaska.   Live internet coverage of the activities around the world, including videos, photographs and messages from events in every continent, is being broadcast on the special website for the World Day for Decent Work www.wddw.org. Union organizations from 115 countries have pre-registered their October 7 activities on the website, and these will be updated via a 24-hour live feed.   The events include large-scale national mobilizations in several countries involving public rallies and workplace meetings, demonstrations in front of national parliaments, concerts, trade union member-to-member contacts in person and by phone and email, seminars involving trade unionists, academics and politicians and high visibility public events in city squares and other venues.   Events organized by young trade unionists will feature prominently in a number of countries, and women trade unionists in every continent will be stepping up their “Decent Work – Decent Life for Women” campaign, which focuses on major concerns to women and men at work, including pay equity and maternity rights amongst other issues.   These and other national actions are linked to the three main themes for the World Day: Rights at Work; Solidarity; and Ending Poverty and Inequality. A number of the national actions will focus on international solidarity with trade unionists facing severe repression in countries such as Burma, Colombia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.   “Workers around the world will be speaking with a united voice on this first ever mobilization of its type, protesting against the results of more than two decades of deregulation: growing insecurity, huge inequality and a downward spiral of global competition which puts profits before people’s fundamental rights. We aim to make this day a catalyst for real change”, said Ryder.   Note: Over 218 million children were illegally employed in 2004, when the last formal assessment of child labor was made.   * To follow in detail the World Day for Decent Work, see the live global broadcast at: www.wddw.org
	Any solution to the Global Food Crisis must be grounded in the Right to Food by UN Human Rights Council   Oct 2008   Any solution to the global food crisis -- which had driven over 100 million more people into extreme poverty and had reversed progress towards the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty -- must be grounded in a human rights-based approach and the principle of the right to food, the Special Rapporteur on the right to food told the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) today.   As delegates continued their final week of discussions on the promotion and protection of human rights, the notion that all social, economic and cultural goals should be realized through a human rights-based approach was a common theme among the Independent Experts and Special Representatives who addressed the Committee today.   In addition to the Rapporteur on the right to food, the Committee also heard presentations by the Special Rapporteur on the right to health, the Chairperson of the Working Group on the right to development, the Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt on human rights, the representative of the Secretary-General on the human rights of internally displaced persons, and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises.   “Grounding the search for solutions to the global food crisis in the right to food means, first of all, that Government will have to devise solutions, taking into account the needs of those who are most vulnerable”, said Olivier de Schutter, Special Rapporteur on the right to food. The increase in food prices over the previous year and a half had hit the poorest households severely, leading them to switch to poorer diets and to cut back on schooling and health. Even more important than boosting production and lowering food prices was the need to raise the incomes and purchasing power of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially landless labourers, pastoralists and the fishing community.   By recognizing the right to food, he said Governments would be required to accept their responsibility to work towards solutions that would stabilize the prices of food commodities. They would be driven to regulate international trade to prevent it from jeopardizing food security and to ensure that trade agreements would allow States the flexibility to protect their population’s right to food, especially when import surges threatened to destroy the livelihood of local farmers. That approach would favour the establishment of recourse mechanisms against Governments that neglected or ignored their obligations towards the right to food and would strengthen the rights of land-users to have equal access to productive resources.   Leading the discussion on financial issues, Cephas Lumina, Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt and other related international financial obligations of States on the full enjoyment of human rights, also stressed the centrality of human rights to the United Nations development agenda.   Though many developed countries contested whether the United Nations human rights mechanisms were the appropriate forum in which to deal with foreign debt, the impact of foreign debt on human rights was irrefutable. The diversion of scarce public resources to servicing foreign debt often meant that highly indebted countries were unable to fulfil their human rights obligations to their citizens.   In some countries, more was spent annually on debt service than on human rights-related public services, such as education and health combined.   To address the issue, he called on Member States to consider making extrabudgetary allocations to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to enable it to support a proposal to undertake a thematic study on foreign debt and human rights.   Corporate responsibility to enforce human rights could also not be overlooked, said Anand Grover, the Special Rapporteur on the right to health, referring to pharmaceutical companies and their obligation to uphold the right to health. Though his predecessor had laid the groundwork for applying a human rights-based approach to the right to health, almost all past reports had addressed the obligations of States.   Noting that the human rights responsibilities of non-State actors, such as pharmaceutical companies, had previously been unclear, the Rapporteur had annexed a set of human rights guidelines for pharmaceutical companies to his report, which set out the human rights responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies consistent with, and complementary to, the work of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, John Ruggie.   Elaborating further on the responsibility of companies to respect human rights, Mr. Ruggie drew attention to the obligations of corporations, as had been stipulated in soft law instruments, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) Tripartite Declaration and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Guidelines.   However, the majority of those companies had yet to implement the necessary due diligence process, whereby companies became aware of, prevented, and addressed adverse human rights impacts, ensuring compliance. At the same time, Governments must manage corporations in such a way that would allow for human rights concerns to be considered when shaping national commercial policy, investment policy, securities regulation and corporate governance. The right to development included both social and economic rights, since they were inextricably connected.   The Chairperson of the Working Group on the right to development, Arjun Sengupta, who also spoke to the Committee today, said his work was aimed at promoting the implementation of that right in the policies and practices of partner institutions, through progressively refining and developing the criteria in a manner that benefited all concerned.   The Working Group was also considering the possibility of evolving a comprehensive and coherent set of standards to assess the implementation of the right to development into an international legal standard of a binding nature, through a collaborative process of engagement. However, such complex work needed time, adequate resources, and substantive inputs by Member States, experts and institutions.   It also needed political commitment and the recognition of the value of a human rights system accompanied by a set of obligations that would ensure the implementation of the right to development.   The Representative of the Secretary-General on the human rights of internally displaced person, Walter Kalin, highlighted the success of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement -- first presented to the former Commission on Human Rights in 1998 -- in integrating a rights-based approach in the work of international humanitarian agencies during natural disaster and armed conflict emergencies, especially in the early recovery and reconstruction phases. Visit the related web page
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