NEWS
by Marie-Louise Jackson-Miller on behalf of the WILPF-US Nominating Committee
The Nominating Committee is excited to seek applicants among our members to serve on the WILPF-US Board. Let us know if you are interested in this opportunity by writing to nominations@wilpfus.org. Applications are due by Jan. 1, 2014. If you would like to encourage a colleague or friend in WILPF to apply to our board, please nominate them! Board applications and nominating forms can be found on our website under Leadership Opportunities. It is good practice to contact the person you’d like to nominate and let them know your plans.
Our WILPF-US board positions include: president or team of two co-presidents for a term of two years; secretary for a term of one year; treasurer for a term of three years; two program committee chairs – 1st place candidate will serve a three-year term and 2nd place candidate will serve a one-year term; personnel committee chair for a term of three years; development committee chair for a term of two years; nominating committee chair for a term of two years; membership development committee chair for a term of three years; and two at-large board members – 1st place candidate will serve two years and 2nd place candidate will serve one year. After these initial staggered terms are completed, all subsequent terms will be three years. Brief descriptions of these positions can be found in our WILPF Bylaws on our website.
There are also appointed positions available. The WILPF-US board may appoint up to two WILPF-US United Nations Representatives as well as two Youth UN Representatives. Our UN Representatives do not participate in governance decisions on the WILPF-US board, but they do speak for our organization in an international body and carry WILPF's message to individual diplomats. Recently, on Nov. 19, the nominating committee approved and the current WILPF-US board appointed Rachel Nagin to replace Abigail Ruane who will complete her term as our WILPF-US UN Representative at the end of Dec. 2013. After her training in December, Rachel will officially begin in January 2014 for a 2-year term.
Our current nominating committee members are: Sabreena Britt from Sacramento, CA; Kristin Alder from Southlake, TX; Laurie Gates from Cape Cod, MA; Pat O’Brien from Cambridge, MA and Marie-Louise Jackson-Miller from Quincy, MA (convener).
by Nancy Price, Earth Democracy Issue Committee
No Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Pacific Rim Agreement by End of Year
Ministers from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries who believe that global trade will lift all boats convened in Asia from Dec. 3-10. More than 90 Indonesian organizations and social movements called for a Global Day of Action on Dec. 3, the WTO opening day, but these were not covered in the US corporate-owned media.
The 9th Ministerial Meeting of the WTO was held Dec. 3-6 in Bali, Indonesia. With little success over the past 12 years, this meeting was crucial to the future of global trade and to head off possible WTO collapse in favor of the two large regional trade agreements now under negotiation: the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and The Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) between the US and 28 EU countries.
The TPP Ministers met in Singapore Dec. 7-10 after the secret preparatory meeting of chief negotiators and experts before Thanksgiving in Salt Lake City, where local groups and the Backbone Campaign organized street protests, Teach-Ins, and evening light-shows.
Global Trade and Climate Impact
Because, as you know, the latest round of international climate negotiations, the Conference of Parties or COP 19, that took place in Warsaw, Nov. 11-22, went up in smoke, we of the Earth Democracy Issue Committee must emphasize that increased regional trade both in the Pacific Rim and between the EU and the US will impact the climate and devastation will ripple across planet earth.
Nevertheless, the “Interim Environmental Review” of the TPP concluded that increased trade from the TPP is not likely to result in significant adverse environmental impacts in the US and that the likelihood and magnitude of any increased risk is difficult to quantify, but appears to be small in regard to global and trans-boundary environmental impacts.
We also call for the still secret TPP text, including the Environment Chapter, is released immediately so we can judge for ourselves.
Global Trade and Fracking: What you need to know.
Currently Japan, one of the negotiating TPP Pac-Rim countries, is the world’s top importer of liquid natural gas (LNG) produced by fracking. South Korea is not far behind and has indicated interest in joining TPP negotiations. Global trade and especially the TPP would greatly expand the number of countries “pre-qualified” for Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) exports under US law.
The US Natural Gas Act requires environmental and economic review before allowing an LNG export project to move forward—a process environmental organizers have often tried to exploit in order to raise the costs of a project and ultimately stop it. However, all this changes for exports going to countries with which the US has a Free Trade Agreement. The US Natural Gas Act explicitly states that these projects are automatically “deemed to be consistent with the public interest and applications for such importation or exportation shall be granted without modification or delay.”
Thus, by vastly increasing the number of countries with which the US has a Free Trade Agreement, such as with the Pacific Rim TPP and TAFTA countries, the number of LNG export projects that must be approved “without modification or delay” will vastly increase. Since the TPP will greatly reduce the authority of the EPA to regulate effectively to protect the environment and will allow for investor-to-state challenges of US environmental laws by foreign corporations, our environment will be further under attack.
World Trade Organization Ministerial Meeting
From December 3-6, 159 Member government representatives met at the 9th Ministerial, the highest decision-making body of the World Trade Organization, in Bali, Indonesia. On the verge of collapse, because previous meetings had failed to produce agreement, the WTO was considered on the verge of collapse. But with the meeting extended to Dec. 7, at the final hours exhausted negotiators finally pushed through the legally binding “Bali-package” criticized by members of civil society as only a “victory” for developed countries and their corporations and corporate investors at the expense of developing countries, the poor and the hungry.
In reaction, on Dec. 9, the Indigenous Environmental Network released their “Declaration: The World Trade Organization (WTO) and Indigenous Peoples: Resisting Globalization, Asserting Self-Determination.”
Trans-Pacific Partnership Ministers Meet
The TPP Ministers met from December. 7-10, and on Dec. 9, Wikileaks released two documents; the first revealing the talks are “paralyzed,” with disagreement on a large number of issues and the US, refusing to compromise, trying to bully other countries into submission. The second document is a list country-by-country of the many areas of disagreement including intellectual property and thirteen other chapters of the draft agreement. This suggests that the TPP negotiations can only be concluded if the Asia-Pacific countries back down on key national interest issues, otherwise the treaty will fail altogether.
Pres. Obama hopes that the "successful" break-through at the WTO meetings will carry over into success at the TPP Ministerial. Now that the U.S. has failed to bully the other countries, the negotiations have fallen apart and there will be no TPP agreement by the end of the year. This will give us time to Stop Fast Track so that we can Stop the TPP.
Top Image: The WILPF Earth Democracy logo was designed and donated by www.ciafront.org.
Second Image: Salt Lake City resident Raphael Cordray of Peaceful Uprising and Utah Tar Sands Resistance. The Grand America Hotel in the background is where the TPP delegates were meeting.
Women and Natural Resources: Unlocking the Peacebuilding Potential
UN Report Released Nov. 2013
by the Advancing Human Rights Issue Committee
Ensuring that women have better access to and control of natural resources such as land, water, forests and minerals can improve the chances of long-term peace and recovery in war-torn countries, according to a new report released by the United Nations on November 6.
“At a practical level, women form the majority of resource users and managers in peacebuilding settings, but this responsibility seldom translates to the political or economic levels. This has to change,” said Achim Steiner UN Under-Secretary-General and UNExecutive Director. “Part I of the report examines the EP relationship between women and natural resources in peacebuilding contexts, reviewing key issues across three main categories of resources: land, renewable and extractive resources. Part II discusses entry points for peacebuilding practitioners to address risks and opportunities related to women and natural resource management, focusing on political participation, protection, and economic empowerment. This report was developed by the United Nations Environment UNEP, UN Women, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and UN Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), whose members contributed critical guidance and expertise to the project.” —from Woman and Natural Resources: Unlocking the Peacebuilding Potential.
Executive Summary
Women’s diverse experiences in times of conflict have powerful implications for peacebuilding. Their capacity to recover from conflict and contribute to peace is influenced by their role in the conflict, whether directly engaged in armed groups, displaced, or forced to take on additional responsibilities to sustain their livelihoods and care for dependents. In spite of efforts by the international community to recognize and better address these multiple roles through agreements such as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the dominant perception of women as passive victims in conflict settings continues to constrain their ability to formally engage in political, economic and social recovery, and thereby contribute to better peacebuilding. One of the unexplored entry points for strengthening women’s contributions to peacebuilding relates to the ways in which they use, manage, make decisions on and benefit from natural resources. Coupled with shifting gender norms in conflict-affected settings, women’s roles in natural resource management provide significant opportunities to enhance their participation in decisionmaking at all levels, and to enable them to engage more productively in economic revitalization activities.
As the primary providers of water, food and energy at the household and community levels, women in rural settings are often highly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, and are therefore particularly susceptible to changes in the availability and quality of these resources during and after conflict. In particular, lack of access to land – which underpins rights to all other natural resources and is a key asset for securing productive inputs – can force them into increasingly vulnerable situations and expose them to higher levels of physical and livelihood risk, with trickle-down impacts on community welfare. The structural discrimination that women face regarding resource rights and access also limits their political participation and economic productivity.
At the same time, conflict often leads both women and men to adopt coping strategies that challenge traditional gender norms. To meet the needs of their households and compensate for loss of revenue usually provided by male family members, women may assume new natural resource management roles, either by taking up alternative income-generating activities or by moving into traditionally male sectors. In the aftermath of conflict, capitalizing on these shifting roles can contribute to breaking down barriers to womenʼs empowerment and enhancing womenʼs productivity in sectors that are often critical to economic revitalization.
Failure to recognize the challenges and opportunities awarded to women in conflict-affected settings by their various roles in natural resource management also risks perpetuating inequalities and deepening grievances linked to natural resource rights, access and control, which have proven to be powerful catalysts for violence. Addressing issues of inequality related to resource access and ownership, participation in decision-making and benefitsharing early on in the peacebuilding process is therefore a critical condition for lasting peace and development.
To strengthen peacebuilding outcomes by enhancing womenʼs engagement and empowerment in conflict- affected contexts through sustainable natural resource management, this report recommends that national governments and the international community take the following action:
1. Promote womenʼs participation in formal and informal decision-making structures and governance processes related to natural resource management in peacebuilding: Working with natural resource management authorities can help increase womenʼs participation in decision-making at the sub-national and national levels. However, targeted support is needed for overcoming the structural, social and cultural barriers to womenʼs formal and informal political participation in conflict-affected settings. This can be achieved by including women and gender specialists early on in peace negotiations in a variety of positions – as negotiators, as expert advisors and as civil society observers – and in mediation support teams, as well as supporting their capacity to engage effectively in these processes. It also requires ensuring that women are represented in relevant decision-making bodies, including through the use of quotas and soliciting inputs from a broad range of womenʼs groups and networks when elaborating natural resource management policies. In addition gender experts should be part of teams charged with developing policies and other governance tools around natural resource management inpeacebuilding contexts, including in supply-chain certification mechanisms, benefit-sharing schemes, and transparency initiatives. Finally, it is essential to provide training and capacity-building and to support the advocacy efforts of womenʼs organizations and networks.
2. Adopt proactive measures to protect women from resource-related physical violence and other security risks early in the peacebuilding period: Women in conflict-affected settings routinely experience physical insecurity, including sexual violence, when carrying out daily tasks linked to the collection and use of natural resources. Moreover, while the impacts of environmental contamination and pollution adversely affect all, women are particularly vulnerable, due to heightened exposure in their gendered roles and responsibilities. Protecting women from these risks is not only important to their health, but also key to ensuring that they are able to safely carry out economic and social activities linked to natural resource management. Among other measures, addressing these risks can involve: conducting assessments to identify specific resource and environment-related security and health threats for women in conflict-affected contexts; ensuring that women have safe access to key resources, such as fuel wood and water, in internally displaced persons and refugee camps; supporting the dissemination of innovative technologies, such as improved cook stoves, that protect women from adverse health impacts in carrying out their roles; increasing womenʼs participation in security sector institutions and conflict resolution processes; and supporting awareness-raising and training on womenʼs rights among the staff of government institutions and the national security sector, as well as at the community level, in order to increase gender-sensitive operational effectiveness and security service delivery by the army and police.
3. Remove barriers and create enabling conditions to build womenʼs capacity for productive and sustainable use of natural resources: Access to credit, technical support and benefits from natural resource exploitation is essential to improving womenʼs economic productivity, which in turn is key to their empowerment. Likewise, legal support for the enforcement of land rights and other resource rights underpins womenʼs ability to productively use natural resources for their recovery. Achieving this can include: identifying womenʼs specific roles in key natural resource sectors and how those roles may have been affected during conflict, establishing regular consultative mechanisms with a variety of womenʼs groups and networks on the development of basic service infrastructure in their communities, prioritizing land negotiation and reform processes that improve womenʼs rights to land. In addition, providing legal aid, conflict management, negotiation and mediation services to women can enable them to enforce their resource-related rights and access dispute resolution mechanisms. Prioritizing access to finance, inputs and skills training for women and men equally, upholding human rights and minimum labor standards for womenʼs involvement in the extractive sectors and ensuring private companies operating in the extractive sectors engage both men and women during environmental and social impact assessments, as well as throughout the project cycle can further improve womenʼs productive and sustainable use of natural resources. Finally, womenʼs representation on commissions established for wealth-sharing and national and sub-national level and the provision of gender expertise for such bodies, should be prioritized and efforts made to ensure that women are included in community- based natural resource management initiatives in conflict-affected settings.
4. Within the United Nations, increase inter-agency cooperation to pursue womenʼs empowerment and sustainable natural resource management together in support of more effective peacebuilding: Existing inter-agency mechanisms at the global and country levels should be tasked to address the risks and opportunities presented to women by natural resource management in peacebuilding contexts more systematically in their work, including by: conducting pilot programmes to learn lessons on how to integrate the linkages between women, natural resources and peacebuilding in joint assessments and country programming; ensuring that 15 per cent of all funding towards UN-supported natural resource management programmes in peacebuilding is allocated to womenʼs empowerment and gender equality; requiring the collection of sex and age- disaggregated data on peacebuilding and recovery programmes that address and/or have an impact on natural resource management; developing specific targets related to the participation of women and gender experts in natural resource management in post-conflict countries, in line with the priorities and goals set in the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States and the goals for the post-2015 development agenda; supporting further research on the nexus of women, natural resources and peacebuilding, particularly in areas where significant knowledge gaps remain; and integrating gender equality and womenʼs empowerment issues in meetings of actors working on addressing the linkages between natural resources, conflict and peacebuilding.
More information. http://reliefweb.int/report/world/women-and-natural-resources-unlocking-...
Read the entire report. http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/UNEP_UN-Women_P...
 |
|
Rachel Nagin is a second generation WILPF member who currently serves on the national communications committee. We are delighted to announce our new WILPF-US United Nations Representative, Rachel Nagin. Rachel will work with our current UN Representative, Abigail Ruane, for a smooth transition during the month of December. There is an opening for one more UN Representative and two openings for Youth UN Representatives. If you are interested or know of any interested candidates, please consider completing the nominating form on our website. |
For nearly 100 years, you and our foremothers in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have created and nurtured a worldwide social movement for just and sustainable peace, working locally and globally to strengthen civil society and prevent war. Thank you for your work, and your contributions over the last year. We ask you to renew your generosity so that this work can continue into the future.
In 2013, your generosity resulted in:
Participatory workshops held with WILPF’s civil society partners in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen in preparation for the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). A delegation of 12 WILPF-sponsored participants from the MENA region participated in a full week of the CSW from 2-9 March 2013, culminating with a public side event hosted by the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations on 8 March, International Women’s Day, to discuss how the reinforcement of patriarchal power structures enable the continuation of violence in the region. This international delegation was supported by the efforts of six WILPF U.S. members participating in the Local2Global program and 24 college women enrolled in WILPF’s Practicum in Advocacy Program.
The successful negotiation of a robust and comprehensive Arms Trade Treaty, including a legally-binding provision on preventing armed gender-based violence. The treaty requires exporting state parties to assess the risk that the weapons being transferred would facilitate gender-based violence by either state or non-state actors, and not to make the transfer if there is such a risk. WILPF-US and around the world continues to work for the ratification and implementation of this treaty, adopted in April 2013. The linkage between the arms trade and gender-based violence was subsequently acknowledged by the Human Rights Council in its adoption of a landmark resolution on the human rights consequences of the arms trade.
The presentation of “shadow reports” to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) by WILPF activists from the United Kingdom, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia during their countries’ periodic reviews. In considering relevant data on women’s equality data through WILPF’s unique “women, peace and security” lens, the CEDAWcommittee’s concluding recommendations in all instances point toward a fresh understanding and clear articulation of SCR1325 enforcement and applicability. Particularly important for WILPF is the CEDAW committee’s agreement that the provisions of SCR1325 apply to domestic as well as international armed conflicts.
In addition to supporting the global work of our secretariat and of WILPF sections everywhere, your gift to WILPF does much more. Here are a few examples of what WILPF has been doing in our own country:
- Des Moines WILPF exposed the hypocrisy of the World Food Prize Foundation and their promotion of chemical-laden industrial agriculture, including GMOs, with a week of protests and educational events, providing a platform for farmer-activists from Haiti/Brazil and Kenya to gather support for their rebellion against Monsanto.
- WILPF Branches from California to Vermont continue advocacy (and direct action) to close nuclear power plants, resulting over the past year in the decommissioning of three aging and damaged reactors and preventing the licensing of another.
- Members of our Earth Democracy committee challenged their colleagues in the Move to Amend coalition to look beyond the immediate goal of amending the US constitution and began building a global movement for People, Peace and the Planet by co-convening an Earth Democracy Conference at the Democracy Convention in Madison, WI. WILPF members shared the Challenging Corporate Power study guide and organized numerous plenaries to explore practical applications of the Principle of Guardianship for Future Generations to safeguard earth rights and advance the green transformation of our economy and technologies.
- WILPF-US started planning for its second hundred years with a retreat organized by its “transition team” for board members and emerging new leaders, yielding the beginnings of a blue print for the future currently circulating for comment at regional membership meetings and by individual members on line at http://100years.wilpfus.org/.
Throughout the year, the impact of your gift to WILPF is visible in vigils and teach-ins, in workshops and film screenings, in rallies and acts of civil disobedience.
Thank you for enabling this work.
Looking forward to 2014 and beyond, WILPF-US has committed to:
- strengthening the Local2Global and Practicum in Advocacy at the United Nations programs over the next three years with a special emphasis on intergenerational mentoring;
- participating in and financially supporting a hemispheric Women, Peace and Security strategy meeting in Bogota, Colombia;
- engaging as many WILPF members as possible in supporting the Nuclear Abolition Treaty, which currently has the endorsement of 125 U.N. member states—but not the US.
Your renewed financial commitment will ensure that these plans come to fruition and that WILPF’s highly successful mini-grant program continues to expand.
WILPF’s work impacts communities, corporations and governments around the world and across the United States. That impact depends on your generosity.Please give as much as you are able at this exciting time of organizational renewal and transformation.
P.S. We’re grateful you have made WILPF your political “home;" your intellectual and energetic contributions are what keep WILPF relevant. Please make sure we have your current email so that you can be promptly informed about new WILPF initiatives and projects as they unfold.
Top photo: Audley Greene, Robin Lloyd, Pat O’Brien and Ruth Weizenbaum have made WILPF their political home for years. Here they pose with a sculpture of WILPF founding member Lola Maverick Lloyd following the first performance of “Women, War and Peace: Robin speaks to her grandmother” at a house party sponsored by Audley on November 16, 2013. If you’re interested in booking this presentation that includes an in depth, guided discussion of the women who attended the Hague Conference in 1915 linking their ideas to WILPF’s current campaigns, please contact Robin at robinlloyd8@gmail.com.
