‘Zone of Peace’ Campaign Launched In 3 Countries to Build ‘People(s)-Centered Movement’ in the Americas

Early in October, the United Kingdom introduced new rules for international travel in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. A “red list” of 54 countries was announced that mandated quarantine for passengers from mostly Global South countries. A few days later, the red list was revised to retain seven countries—Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Panama, Peru and Venezuela. 

But how will these travel restrictions affect negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s 26th Conference of Parties, also known as COP26? This summit is scheduled to be held next month in Glasgow, Scotland, where delegates from more than 190 countries are convening to figure out how to meet the stipulations of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

However, people from the seven red-listed countries traveling to the United Kingdom must undergo a mandatory quarantine, even if they are vaccinated. And while the U.K. government has announced it will cover quarantine costs, these rules may be contributing to an already inequitable COP set-up. Previous COPs had ended in less-than-ideal outcomes over issues concerning equity.

“[The red list] evidences disparities between countries and the reality of vaccine inequality,” said Maria Alejandra Aguilar, associate lawyer in the climate justice division at Ambiente y Sociedad, an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) in Colombia. Aguilar is an accredited observer for COP26 and despite her credentials, she worried about being able to travel to Glasgow. “The visa process was a nightmare for me and several delegates—even official ones,” she added, noting how her visa arrived on October 20, two days before her flight, even though she had applied for the visa on July 27. 

Aguilar tweeted about her experience with the British Embassy in Colombia, noting how they held onto her passport for two months without an answer. Then on October 6, they asked her what COP26 is and what she intends to do in the United Kingdom.

I want to share the level of incompetence of the @GOVUK visas&immigration- I applied the 5th of August for a visa to attend @COP26 as accredited observer @UKinColombia 2 months without answer + withholding my passport, today this was their reply #COP26 pic.twitter.com/JjFcwTwgxU

— Maria Alejandra Aguilar (@AguilarMaria21) October 6, 2021

Meanwhile, Colombia is only reporting around 1,000 cases per day compared to the United Kingdom’s approximately 50,000 cases per day.

“I haven’t been able to understand why my country was on the red list, but the U.S. was never on the list, even though they had many COVID cases,” said Adrian Martínez, director and founder of La Ruta del Clima, a Costa Rican NGO focusing on climate governance processes and climate justice. As of publication, the United States had about 80,000 cases per day, whereas Costa Rica had around 600 cases per day. “We felt that we were being differentiated because of where we’re from,” he added. 

Until a few days ago, most of Latin America was on the red list. Martínez said that is why countries like Mexico were considering sending only the core team of negotiators to Glasgow. He also added many NGOs in these countries did not try to obtain visas because they thought they would not be able to participate in COP26, given the restrictions.

If a country only sends a core team of negotiators, experts who routinely accompany negotiators to climate-change negotiations very likely will not be doing so because of the uncertainties that have arisen in the process, even with the revised red list. These countries also may reduce the number of negotiators they would send to Glasgow.

Martínez described the situation as a “distraction” from the prep work negotiators and other experts normally engaged during the weeks prior to previous COPs. “How to participate [at COP26] and who can get there has become the main issue,” he explained. 

A COP26 spokesperson said ensuring the voices of those most affected by climate change are heard is a “priority for the COP26 Presidency.” The spokesperson also added financial support is available for delegates from developing countries for quarantine stays. But the spokesperson has yet to respond to what extent such financial support can remedy problems Global South representatives have faced in the last few months and will continue to face during negotiations. Meanwhile, the U.K. Department for Transport has yet to reply to this reporter. Questions also were sent to the UNFCCC. This article will be updated when responses are received.

“This closed, gatekeeping approach [to COPs] is political,” Martínez said. “It was supposed to be the most inclusive COP, but it has been the opposite. We had to complain and fight and persevere.”

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.

If you had missed it, don’t worry.

On January 28, the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Coercive Economic Measures launched at the People’s Forum in New York City.

In the two-and-a-half months since then, the tribunal has held four virtual hearings across multiple time zones. Each hearing has zoomed in on a country that has faced Western sanctions. Experts provide testimony in a couple of hours’ time. So far, the impact of sanctions has been examined in hearings held on Zimbabwe, Syria, Korea and Libya.

Not only do the hearings intend to expose the effects of U.S. sanctions and blockades on targeted countries. The goal is to create strategies for legal accountability. Hearings will take place until June on a total of 15 countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia.

The tribunal’s website states:

People’s Tribunals capture the ethos of self-determination and internationalism that was expressed through twentieth century anti-colonial struggles and was institutionalized in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Cuba. They bring together movement lawyers, scholars, and organizers from around the world and are designed by and accountable to the social movements and communities in which they are rooted. Operating outside of the logics and institutions of capitalist and imperialist law, People’s Tribunals make decisions that may not be binding and do not have the force of law, but their achievements in a political and discursive register inspire and provide the tools necessary for present and future organizing. People’s Tribunals allow the oppressed to judge the powerful, defining the content as well as the scope of the procedures, which reverses the norm of the powerful creating and implementing the law.

There is a long tradition of radical organizers and lawyers using the law to put capitalism and imperialism on trial. Organized by the Civil Rights Congress, and supported by the Communist Party as well as a host of Black leftist luminaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and Paul Robeson, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief of a Crime of the United States against the Negro People, indicted the political-economic system of capitalism and white supremacy for inflicting numerous forms of structural and physical violence on Black people in the U.S. as well as drawing parallels to U.S. imperialist violence abroad. The Russell Tribunal was set up in 1966 to judge U.S. military intervention and war crimes in Vietnam. The same format reemerged in later Russell Tribunals dealing with the U.S.-backed Brazilian and Argentinian military dictatorships (1964 and 1976, respectively), the U.S.-backed coup in Chile (1973), and the U.S.-European interventions against Iraq (1990, 2003). The 2016 International Tribunal for Democracy in Brazil critically examined the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the role of the U.S. government. Organized in Brussels by both Philippine and international groups, the 2018 International People’s Tribunal on the Philippines exposed and condemned the multiple forms of state violence visited on the people of the Philippines since Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016. And finally, the U.S. government was put directly on trial by a pair of innovative People’s Tribunals, including the 2007 International Tribunal on Katrina and Rita and the 2018 International Tribunal on U.S. Colonial Crimes Against Puerto Rico.

Check out the video of the tribunal’s launch.

The launch event featured jurists, scholars and activists, including:

1. Nina Farnia, Co-chair of the Tribunal Steering Committee & Professor of Law, Albany Law School
2. Niloufer Bhagwat, Confederation of Lawyers of Asia and the Pacific
3. Brian Becker, ANSWER Coalition
4. Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, The Frantz Fanon Foundation
5. Booker Omole, Communist Party of Kenya
6. Carlos Ron, Vice Minister of Foreign Relations for North America
7. Suzanne Adely, President National Lawyers Guild & Tribunal Steering Committee
8. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Former United Nations Independent Expert
9. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Historian & Scholar
10. Claudia De La Cruz, People’s Forum
11. Sara Flounders, Sanctions Kill
12. Helyeh Doutaghi, Co-chair of the Tribunal Steering Committee & Adjunct Professor, Carleton University

Multiple organizations are listed as co-organizers and endorsers.

The public is encouraged to register for upcoming online hearings at sanctionstribunal.org.

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of mostly women gathered at Catholic University’s Maloney Hall during the first weekend of March to convene the first U.S.-based conference of a worldwide grassroots women’s network called the International Women’s Alliance, as well as help strengthen its fledgling U.S. chapter.

The conference kicked off early Saturday morning with speeches by Washington, D.C., “situationers,” Jacqueline Luqman and Madhvi Bahl.

Luqman, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace as well as IWA member organization Pan-African Community Action, gave an overview of how the U.S. government has oppressed Africans, starting from the late 1800s, when former slaves migrated from the U.S. South to Washington, D.C.. The U.S. Congress must approve all legislation passed by the district council and it controls the district’s budget. The U.S. President appoints the district’s judges, while it has no voting representation in Congress.

“It is because we are still a majority Black city, just barely. Forty percent Black with a 30 percent white population that is growing rapidly, due to continued rapacious gentrification,” Luqman told the crowd, which responded throughout her 18-minute presentation with hoots, hollers and applause. Luqman, also Toward Freedom‘s Board Secretary, left the mic to a standing ovation. Her talk can be found 28 minutes into this livestream playback.

Meanwhile, Bahl of the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network described how migrants’ human rights are being violated as they are used in a political tug of war.

IWA Chairperson Azra Talat Sayeed represents Roots of Equity, a Pakistan-based group that organizes peasants, women and religious minorities in Pakistan. She described the poverty in her country, which she connected to U.S. interference. In Pakistan, 44 percent of children under the age of five are experiencing stunted growth due to lack of food.

“My country is bleeding,” Sayeed said. “It’s a massacre.”

Later, Monisha Rios, a U.S. military veteran and psychologist who lives in Puerto Rico, described the impact of U.S. militarization on women around the world and the effect of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico.

Then a panel discussion featured women on the front lines of the working-class movement in the United States.

Edith Saldano of Starbucks Workers United spoke of workplace harassment that led to her radicalization. “Y’all are going to cry with me today,” the Santa Cruz, California-based worker said as her face grew red. She said it is normal for customers to physically attack workers. Saldano described one incident where someone threw a banana at a barista.

The Starbucks worker identified three issues that threaten employed women: Harassment, unstable working conditions (including schedules) and workplace injuries.

“It’s consistently putting working women in survival mode.”

Saldano said already about 100 workers who have been organizing unions in Starbucks coffee shops have been fired and subsequently blacklisted from working at other company stores.

“How do we give the working class a solution?” Saldano asked.

The panel discussion also featured Christina Brown, the sister of 39-year-old Poushawn Brown, a Virginia-based Amazon employee who had no medical training, but was switched to a role that involved testing workers for COVID-19 on a daily basis. However, Christina said her sister was not provided with the proper protective gear nor with hazard pay. A few months after she began testing workers, Poushawn returned home on January 7, 2021, not feeling well. The shock came the next morning.

“She did not wake up,” Christina told conference attendees.

Now, Christina raises her sister’s 14-year-old daughter and is engaged in a legal battle with Amazon.

“I’m up against a trillion-dollar company all by myself. It’s just me doing it. I can’t stop.”

Panel moderator Monica Moorehead, who helped found the IWA, remarked on the recent U.S. federal government’s move to eliminate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food to poor households. The majority of recipients are people of color.

“This is a slow genocide,” Moorehead remarked.

The International Women’s Alliance also introduced a proposed campaign, “Meet Women’s Needs; Stop Corporate Greed!” This campaign is designed to address the failings of the U.S. government to meet the needs of women and their families, and demand change. This comes in addition to previously launched ongoing campaigns, “War and Militarism” and “Women Over Profit.”

The alliance kicked off in 2010 in Montreal in response to the International League of People’s Struggle’s 2008 call for a women’s conference to be held. 2010 was the centennial year International Toiling Women’s Day.

Later on during the first day of the conference, hundreds of women and their supporters started rallying at the Philippine embassy in Washington, D.C.

There, Vivian Flanagan from Terrapin Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (TerpCHRP) at the University of Maryland College Park, spoke to the impacts of war on women. They focused on one weapons manufacturer found on their campus, Lockheed Martin, and shared how its former executive vice-president, Linda Gooden, is on the Board of Regents that oversees all of Maryland’s public universities.

“Let Linda’s ‘professional success’ at the expense of trafficked, exploited and martyred women affected by Lockheed Martin’s war machine be a reminder of the treachery of liberal feminism,” she said.

After marching to the World Bank, organizations from Palestinian Youth Movement, Katarungan DC, CODEPINK, and spoke about the World Bank’s role in suppressing poor countries through foreign aid that perpetuates indebtedness. Raymond Diaz from Katarungan DC shared about their parents’ migration experience.

“Much like many children of poor immigrants, my Mexican parents left everything they knew when NAFTA came in, driving thousands of laborers out of their homeland and becoming a part of the working class in this country.”

When the march arrived at the White House, speakers from United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Committee in Solidarity of the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Anti-Imperialist Action at University of Maryland Baltimore County, International League of Peoples Struggles (ILPS), African National Women’s Organization, Resist U.S. Led War, and IWA emphasized the call for international solidarity.

At the White House, Katie Comfort of IWA called for the unity of women and urged for the need to organize.

“Women are uniting around the world against U.S. imperialism and [women in the] the U.S. [have] to be a part of that movement. The International Women’s Alliance takes seriously the call to build IWA Americas not just here in the U.S., but in the Caribbean, in Latin America, to unite women around the world, to understand our common enemy is the U.S., the U.S. state, the U.S. military, who kills and rapes our women. So, we are here today to say the movement has to start now. We are not just here this weekend to speak out about it one time, but to keep speaking out about it until this House belongs to the People. We are here to declare Women over Profit.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.