Social Watch news

When the World Economic Forum (WEF) met last January in Switzerland, attended mostly by the rich and the super-rich, the London-based charity Oxfam unveiled a report with an alarming statistic: if current trends continue, the world’s richest one percent would own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016.

And just 80 of the world’s richest will control as much wealth as 3.5 billion people: half the world’s population.

The post-2015 development agenda will only succeed if the SDGs include meaningful and time-bound targets and commitments for the rich that trigger the necessary regulatory and fiscal policy changes.

On Monday, the 23rd of March 2015, government representatives will meet at UN Headquarters for five days of negotiations on the SDG’s goals, targets and indicators.

Governments should resist the temptation –particularly when looking at targets and indicators- to be restricted by existing quantitative monitoring systems and the current (and limited) availability of data.

Instead, Governments should set a truly transformative and ambitious framework, which will lay the ground for innovative monitoring systems, which include qualitative assessments for key SDG targets such as “policy space” and “justice for all”. Voices of citizens need to be heard to capture the dark corners of inequalities within and among countries and to channel the potential of a 'data revolution' without infringing on privacy or sovereignty.

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.

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.