Human Rights in Ireland

Human Rights in Ireland is delighted to welcome this guest post from Hans Zomer, Director of Dochas on the forthcoming Busan Meeting on Aid Effectiveness. Dochas  along with a number of other Irish NGOs will be attending the Busan meeting, if you would like to keep up todate with developments as they happen, you can follow Dochas on Twitter @dochasnetwork and also their blog

At the end of November, leaders of rich and poor countries from around the world will gather in Busan, South Korea, to discuss how they can make aid more effective. For further background on Busan and its importance, particularly as it tries to set a course for Governments on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, please see Dochas blog for  our earlier blog posts. The meeting in Busan follows up on early summits on this issue, in particular the 2005 Paris Declaration and the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action, which were organised as aid donors realised that the current donor landscape is not conducive to delivering on the MDGs.

The 2005 summit started from a very technocratic point of view, and formulated a set of principles and mechanisms for greater donor coordination: the idea was to make “overseas aid” more effective. The 2008 summit, rightly, broadened the discussion, and looked at how to get better at bringing about “Development” (not just do aid better), and how to get “civil society” involved. At the Accra summit, Governments realised that to “make poverty history”, the international community must do more to address the root causes of poverty.

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Human Rights in Ireland is delighted to welcome back Dug Cubie. Dug is a PhD Candidate at UCC and has worked with the Irish Refugee Council and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Dug’s main research interests are in the areas of humanitarian assistance, international development and refugee protection.

The fact that the first famine of the 21^st Century has occurred in the Horn of Africa appears depressingly familiar to the cycle of drought, conflict and famine of the 20^th Century seen in Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and northern Kenya. There is a clear moral imperative for the international community to respond to the horrific loss of life that the current food crisis will precipitate; yet are we simply repeating the next stage of the cycle by doing so? How can this vicious cycle be broken, and how can long-term food security be created in this region of the world?

The failure of the rains for the past four years in the Horn of Africa have led to a natural disaster – drought. The resultant failure of crops, grazing for livestock and lack of food leads to a slowly building human-made disaster – starvation. Famine is declared when acute malnutrition rates among children exceed 30%, yet in southern Somalia malnutrition rates have exceeded 50% and in parts of Turkana in northern Kenya, malnutrition rates are currently 37%. Read Full Post »

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have become the overarching focus for poverty reduction work on the international agenda. The MDG’s first goal is to eradicate poverty and hunger. Within this goal there are specific targets, which include halving the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day; achieving full and productive employment and decent work of all including women and young people and finally halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. While progress towards these targets is being made, stark figures such as World Bank latest estimates show that 1.4 billion people in developing countries were living in extreme poverty in 2005. Poverty remains one of the greatest social injustices and not just because of the deprivation it brings through denial of access to basic rights such as food and clean water, but also the limitations it places on people achieving their potential to provide for themselves and their families.
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With the timeframe for achieving the Millennium Development Goals drawing nearer (2015), the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has invited world leaders to attend a summit in New York on 20 – 22 September 2010. The vision behind this important meeting is to redouble efforts to meet the goals and now more than ever in the face of recent global economic turmoil there is a need to protect those most vulnerable to poverty. Ireland has a key role to play in this summit in its own right and also as part of the EU delegation.

On June 14th, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin will attend an EU Foreign Affairs meeting, which will determine Europe’s negotiation position for the United Nations. In advance of this, over recent months there has been a lot of NGO activity as to how best Ireland can advance its commitments made both in our development aid policy and our commitments to international treaty and resolutions. Agencies such as Trocaire held a high level roundtable asking what can the EU and Ireland do to speed up the progress towards achieving the goals? Most recently, 45 Irish development NGOs under the umbrella of Dochas wrote to Minister for Foreign Affairs urging that Ireland honours its commitment to international aid and give an undertaking to make all efforts to reach the agreed target of .07% Read Full Post »

A rather curious survey by the Guttmacher Institute (a pro-availability of abortion non-profit organization) has cited Ireland and Poland (which in 1997 re-instated law outlawing abortion except when mother’s life at risk or she had been raped) as the only developed countries in the world where there is not adequate access to abortion, presumably because it is not legal in those countries. While there seems little purpose in re-igniting a debate that sends Irish people on both sides into fits of apoplectic fury (another referendum may be an inevitability if a future FG/Labour coalition achieves a sizeable majority and can thereby avoid destablisation) , it does signifying how far behind/ahead of the rest of our cohorts in the OECD are in this regard, and for that alone, it is worth noting. The Report itself is briefly mentioned in both the Irish Times and the BBC.

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