In an open letter to UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon, a coalition of women's rights groups DAWN, IWHC and Resurj urge Ban to reassert the importance of women's rights within the post-2015 development agenda. They call on the Secretary-General to put on emphasis on women's reproductive health, sexual education for both girls and boys and the promotion of women's leadership. The groups see an emerging consensus in the High-Level Panel's report, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network's report and the Global Compact's [...]

In April 2013 Latin American countries responded to the piling lawsuits against their governments by large corporations. In a meeting in Guayaquil, Ecuador, seven states adopted a declaration deciding to take action in order to support each other through a mutual Executive Committee, among other things. The second meeting of this grouping is to be held in July.

In an interview with Susan Tolmay from the women's rights organization AWID, Charlotte Bunch, Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the Center for Women's Global Leadership, Rutgers University, talks about how women's rights have come to be understood more as fundamental human rights, and how the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights helped to shape this process. She also points to the challenges that remain on the road to a full realization of women's rights, and what impact the MDGs [...]

A coalition of NGOs, including Friends of the Earth Europe, Oxfam, the World Development Movement and SOMO have criticized the position EU finance ministers display with regard to financial regulation. They say the EU ignores how financial institutions continue to engage in food speculation, which endangers food security. New regulations are due to be adopted by 2014.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Second World Conference on Human Rights, which produced the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action, a wide range of civil society organizations gathered in Vienna this week. They adopted the Vienna+20 CSO Declaration, which emphasizes the primacy of human rights and calls for rights to be made operational.

Pacific women advocates as part of the Women’s Major Group have issued a statement for the Pacific Small Island Developing States Preparatory Meeting in Nadi, Fiji. The statement calls for recognizing the central role of women for sustainable development in the Pacific area in the outcome document of the Preparatory Meeting that took place in June 2013. The Meeting is part of preparations for Third International Confenrence on SIDS (Small Island Developing States) that will be held in 2014.

“The worst thing about living in extreme poverty is the contempt - that they treat you like you are worthless, that they look at you with disgust and fear and that they even treat you like an enemy.”

“We experience the violence of being discriminated against, of not existing, not being part of the same world, not being treated like other human beings.”

Time and again, poverty is associated with violence against the people that suffer it. Poverty is frequently [...]

Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the Center on Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, critically reviews the proposals put forward by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its Global Redesign Initiative. The report of the initiative, a 500 page collection of proposals of over 40 thematic working groups, calls for a fundamental redesign of global governance towards “multi-stakeholder governance” of governments, corporate actors and civil society. In his new article on Policy Innovations Gleckman lays out some of [...]

The debates on an agenda for international co-operation and development beyond 2015 offer the opportunity to (re-)address in a holistic manner well-being and justice in societies. Given the economic, social and ecological challenges in the world, this is urgently needed.

The present framework of international development goals centering on the MDGs and the related strategies do not provide adequate answers to the global problems, be they accelerated global warming, the growing gap between rich and poor, the financialization of the [...]

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)Beyond 2014 took place from July 7-10. As a product of the conference, participants developed The Hague Civil Society Call to Action on Human Rights and ICPD Beyond 2014. If you would like to support the conference's work on the themes of women’s autonomy and reproductive rights, sexual health and well-being and human rights and gender-based discrimination and violence, please sign the petition.