Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 208 - March 20, 2015

An interesting report named “Illicit financial flows, human rights and the post-2015 development agenda” has been submitted to the Human Rights Council on 9 March 2015 under the agenda item “Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, in political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development”.
The report outlines how illicit financial flows undermine the enjoyment of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights and emphasizes the need for political action.Read more

On the 18th March, the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) hosted a side event in New York to promote the report “Why Public–Private-Partnerships don't work”. The report assessed the impact of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) actually undertaken in rich and poor countries. These global case studies show that there is no evidence that PPPs are cheaper or more convenient for governments in the long-term. Read more

Social Watch will organize –together with different partners– a number of meetings during the World Social Forum 2015 to be held from March 24 -28 in Tunisia.
These meetings will be an opportunity to review and reconsider new challenges of the Post 2015 framework and the Financing for Development process and the challenges the Arab countries are going through after the Arab Spring.
Read more

The ITUC has described an announcement by the United Nations gender body UN Women of a partnership with the Uber company to “create” a million jobs for women as undermining the very principles of the United Nations. Uber has come under fire in countries around the world for undermining incomes and working conditions of women and men who drive taxis for a living, and faced a string of accusations of union–busting, breaches of privacy, and risks to health and safety. Read more

Spurred by the accelerated pace of globalization, and the rise and dominance of multinational and state–owned enterprises over the last few decades, scholars around the world researched many key industrial sectors and exposed the human rights consequences of our multi-faceted economic life. Today, we know the human rights consequences of resource extraction, as well as production, distribution, consumption and disposal of goods. We know how cross-border investments and trade facilitate those economic activities, and the human rights consequences to home and host countries and their citizens. We know the role that finance plays in investments and trade and how finance can both violate people's human rights and help them realize their human rights. Several past financial crises, especially the most recent one, invited much scrutiny on the failure of the global financial system to pay attention to human rights consequences of its excesses. So it is none too soon that the United Nations' Environmental Programme's Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System (the Inquiry) is asking about the role that human rights play in the design of a sustainable financial system. Read more

An intergovernmental accountability mechanism for UN partnerships with the private sector is urgently needed. Regulation and safeguards must replace laxity and low taxes, so that the prevailing paradigm benefits developing countries rather than the corporations that invest in them. Regions Refocus 2015, Third World Network (TWN) and DAWN present their joint recommendations for Addis Ababa. Read the analysis here