Gita Sen, from Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), spoke at the press conference at Rio+20 on June 15th on the topic of Human Rights and Equity.

We’re an organization that has been working on a broad gamut of Women’s human rights for over 25 years. And for us in the work that we do as a group of southern feminists the challenge of integrating how we look at human rights and how we look at development issues has always been central.

It’s nearly impossible to think and talk about human rights unless we look at also the nature of development and what a right to development might actually mean.
As some of us said this morning at a panel organized by the women’s major group, the right to development is great, but right to what development and whose right to development? I think this is a fundamental question in the context of Rio +20 and sustainable development.

What is the nature of women’s resistance and resilience in the face of a development that violates human rights – the human rights of women, their children and their communities?

This morning in a range of vignettes from many parts of the world, we heard about such things as the impacts of uranium mining in Kazakhstan; the land-grab in Cambodia and what happens to women and the violence against them when they resist that; what happens to indigenous women and their struggles against the large transnational road building project in Bolivia; the ongoing impacts of oil production in the Niger delta with its pollution and despoliation of the environment and its implications for the rights of communities and the ability of women to feed and take care of families; the attempts by indigenous Mayan women to maintain their control of food production– the right to food and the possibility of indigenous women to actually grow food locally in a context that we are talking about having sustainable access to consumption and production but not many know how; and the problem of mining including the potential rapid increase of sea bed mining in the Pacific.

What we saw in this range of stories from across the world were a few elements that are central to the question of sustainable production and consumption and the challenge of human rights and social justice: how do these brave words match with the reality of the grabbing of land and resources from communities and people, pollution, soil degradation, despoliation, and displacement of communities, with women and children taking the brunt of the consequences?

How does this happen? The collusion on a massive scale between governments and transnational corporations and collusion between governments and national corporate entities.

The consequences are being felt through enforced free trade, the cooptation and corruption of some of the very same people and organizations including governments that are supposed to be ensuring that those kinds of things don’t happen, and the violence meted out against people, against women, against families when they resist the kind of grab of resources and land that is happening with massive consequences on livelihoods, on the health of people, on the survival of communities and their cultures and the ability to produce and consume in a sustainable manner.

There has been a lot of talk about the Precautionary Principle this morning, but equally important in a world that is struggling to find out which way to make sustainable production and consumption happen is the principle of “Do No Harm” Don’t destroy those communities and ways of sustainable production and consumption that actually exist. We have to protect them.

What is the possibility of sustainable production and consumption if we do not allow the people who are actually practicing it to survive and show the world how to practice it and move forward?

It is perhaps time for us and especially for women to stop playing nice.

There is talk once more about holding Women’s Tribunals where people can testify to the realities of lack of social justice and violation of their human rights. Perhaps it’s time to move towards a women’s charter of human rights that encompasses bodily autonomy and integrity and sexual and reproductive rights and links this to the right to survival, the right to sustain livelihoods, the right to produce and consume in ways that could mean sustainability for the planet.

Q & A:

Q: In terms of expectation of advancing in human rights in negotiations, is it possible to see what hoping for?

A: “Don’t think I’ve spoken to one person in the time that I’ve been here who is optimistic about these negotiations and that is in a sense a very sad state for us to be in.”

“At the same time, I think that it¡¯s important for us to recognize that in some ways this very pessimism can mobilize people particularly from civil society. Well, to be fair, there are two things going on: One is people getting fairly despondent saying “what’s the point?” but there is also another mood that is there, which is to say let’s go back to the drawing board. In the 20 years since the UN conferences of the 90s there have been the spaces that got opened up for civil society on the one side, but on the other side the very hard transformations on the economic side, including run-away and rampant neoliberal and financial globalization without checks and balances, the dramatic consequences of that, the freeing up of transnational corporations to do pretty much what they please in relation to production and trade, without much or without any regulation at all.”

“An example that we heard this morning was that the government of Papua New Guinea has just signed with Nautilus Corporation, an agreement for seabed mining when nobody is clear what the ecological consequences of seabed mining are going to be. We see it in the bilateral and regional trade agreements and their attempt to free up transnational companies from regulation and accountability for degrading and environmentally destructive investments and production.”

“So people are getting fed up and saying that we need to start rethinking our strategies. I wish I could give a more optimistic picture than that one but I think that’s where we are right now in the state of play.”

Q: What do you think about the Major groups and civil society participation in Rio+20 conference?

A: “About the major groups and civil society participation, I think actually the organizers of Rio 20 need to be congratulated for the extent to which the process is open to civil society through the major groups. It’s by no means ideal, but if I compare it with a number of the other spaces that I’ve been in, which are also UN spaces, this is far more open than and far better structured in terms of the possibility of civil society to engage than anywhere else, not seeing civil society as a threat or an enemy but actually as a partner; I think that’s very good.”

However, I think we do run against something which is troubling a number of us and that is we are now nearly at the end of the negotiations calendar. With this, what is supposed to happen next is that it gets handed over to the government of Brazil for them to take it forward. However, we all know the state of the negotiations at this point. So is this then going to mean that the negotiations will continue but sort of in private spaces which will no longer be open to the major groups or to civil society in the way that they’ve been? That will be unfortunate and could mean a real danger to transparency and openness of the process as it has been up to this point. Many people from civil society are extremely concerned that whatever continues to happen by way of informal or formal negotiations should remain open to civil society in at least the way in which it has up until this point.