It's International Nestlé-free Week. Time to swear off Nescafé, Milo (*gasp*), Butter Menthol and Nestlé chocolate, yoghourt, frozen dinners and goddam Cheerios and find ethical alternatives. Sometimes a lack of joined-up thinking allows people who care about human rights (whole NGOs, in fact) to drink Nescafé. Or maybe they aren't familiar with the world's longest-running […]
"The scale of maternal mortality is catastrophic. Every minute a woman dies in childbirth or from complications of pregnancy. . . well over 500,000 women a year. 95% are in Africa and Asia. . . This is global health inequality on a shocking scale. For every woman who dies, as many as 30 others suffer […]
Homeless people in France will have legal redress if a draft bill is passed in the current parliamentary session. Homelessness was forced onto the French political agenda when fires in inadequate, overcrowded Paris housing killed almost 50 people in 2005. The issue has been kept alive by the ‘Children of Don Quixote’, a small voluntary […]
Racism and sexism fuel the tragedy that is HIV/AIDS in Africa. Esteemed Canadian Stephen Lewis, in his role as the UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, has highlighted these twin blights — themselves rights violations — in his ongoing effort to draw attention to the crisis and stimulate action. "Gender is at the heart […]
The right to water, the right to health, the right to life, the right to education. They all tie in to something as simple and unmentionable as sanitation. Yes, toilets. The most basic will do, plus some way to wash your hands. One kind that is inadequate is the ‘flying toilet’ found in unsewered shantytowns. […]
School fees as low as 875 shillings ($US12) a year is enough to prevent millions of African children getting even a basic education. Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki made the first 8 years of school free in 2003 — including free textbooks — and the response has been tremendous. In that time, school enrolments have risen […]
It’s hard to believe something so fundamental as water was not mentioned in any of the major human rights treaties until 1989. I guess earlier drafters took water for granted in a way that is now unthinkable. In addition to the explicit provision in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the right to […]
The Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), a Thai NGO established by Burmese expats in 1998, provides primary health care and health education to rural and conflict-ridden areas of Burma. They have 70 teams of 2-5 health workers trying to meet the health needs of some 140,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the east of […]
Greetings to all breastfeeding women! It’s World Breastfeeding Week and what better time to take a rights-based approach to breastfeeding? We all have a right to health. More fully expressed, it is a right to the "highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." Well, the highest available standard of health, both in infancy and […]
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