FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
INTERNATIONAL DELEGATES, FAITH COMMUNITY LOBBYISTS PETITION CONGRESS ON TOP ISSUES THREATENING U.S.?, WORLD?S POOREST CHILDREN
Activist Action Climaxes Ecumenical Advocacy Days Conference in Washington
WASHINGTION - Tues March 13- Christian and civil society human rights advocates lobbied members of Congress yesterday, pressing for greater U.S. support on issues considered vital to the world?s poorest children.
Following an international conference this weekend focused on the status of children, activists are urging Congressional action in 2007 to ensure affordable, accessible, quality healthcare for all children in the U.S.; comprehensive, mandatory and aggressive anti-global warming legislation to protect future generations; and adoption by Congress of new ?Spending for Peace, Not War? priorities.
The mass lobbying day is the climax of the fifth annual international Ecumenical Advocacy Days Conference held in Washington this weekend, with a focus on the world?s poorest children.
Conference presenters and today?s Congressional advocacy group are reporting that the world is making some headway in meeting guidelines for the rights of children- but falling behind in key areas such as human trafficking and HIV/AIDS.
Children?s Defense Fund Founder and President Marian Wright Edelman, told the some 1,000 conference attendees in a Sunday keynote, ?It is sinful that over nine million children in America, the richest nation in the world, are without health insurance. In 2007 people of faith must play a prophetic role of calling upon our nation and leaders to take the next logical, achievable and moral step to guarantee comprehensive health and mental health coverage for all children and pregnant women in America.?
Featured speaker Mercedes Roman, an Ecuadorian sociologist and UN Representative for Defense for Children International (DCI), told attendees, ?There are many examples of how the Convention on the Rights of the Child has changed conditions for the better in many countries.?
Roman, also Latin American Coordinator for the Global Network of Religions for Children, cited an increase in the number of children attending schools. She said, ?Governments have begun to understand that education is the door to social and cultural development.
?I can say that there has been some progress toward the reign of God in some areas,? she said. ?The understanding of children as persons with rights is growing. More people and governments understand that when the status of women advances, the status of children advances.?
But Roman said in some parts of the world, the condition of children has either stayed the same or worsened. ?The number of children with HIV in Africa is growing, along with new means of trafficking in children and sexual abuse. Children are the primary victims of growing drug abuse, and in many places children are becoming sexually active at younger ages,? she said.
During the symposium, titled ?And How Are the Children,? U.S. presenters and participants tackled issues ranging from globalization, environmental degradation and privatization of water resources in developing countries, to child soldiers in Africa and the effect on children of daily killings in places like the Philippines, Burma and Iraq.
One threat to the world?s children is toxic waste. A new United Church of Christ report ?Toxic Waste at 20? was released at the conference, presenting new findings 20 years after UCC?s original landmark report ?Toxic Waste and Race? was published.
Speaking Saturday, Rachel Sparks, a coordinator for the national abolitioni st Not for Sale Campaign, pressed for an to end human trafficking in the United States and abroad. She said, ?We need to recognize that something is going on here.? There are some 200,000 men, women and children currently victimized in the U.S., with more than 27 million affected by trafficking worldwide.
She called on policymakers to ?address not just the supply side but the demand side,? referencing prostitution trafficking in Asia and the U.S.
Conference presenters shared examples that call for change in U.S. trade agreements and the President?s fast track trade authority. Global security workshops addressed concerns including nuclear arms buildup and use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs.
Argentinean Germán Bournissen, National Team of Indigenous Pastoral, Argentina, a Church World Service partner, and Tara Carr-Lemke of the SHARE Foundation detailed how deforestation and contamination of lands from mining and exploitation are harming indigenous communities in Latin America.
Malawaian economist Francis Ng?ambi, also a CWS partner, and Zambia?s Emily Joy Sikazwe, Executive Director, Women for Change, addressed Africa?s crushing debt, the problems with World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment austerity requirements, and the detriments of free trade rather than fair trade,
?Our idea was to look at what U.S. policy is trying to achieve, what African needs actually are, and where the divide is,? Ng?ambi said.
Ng?ambi, Project Officer on Budget, Debt and Trade with the Economic Justice Network of the Fellowship of the Christian Councils in Southern Africa, said, ?There are claims made out there that there is a lot of debt cancellation, but Africa still pays a lot of money on debts and has a long way to go. Over the last ten years there is a growing struggle at the base, not a growing prosperity.?
U.S., Euro subsidies: ?killing Africa softly:?
The U.S.? and Europe?s continuing subsidization of products is having a terrible effect on African farmers, said Ng?ambi. ?It?s killing them softly.? But when Africa wants to subsidize, he said, it?s prohibited.
?AIDS Is not a lion I can see:?
Praising the importance of women in Africa, Zambia?s Sikazwe told of a girl child with younger siblings aged ten, six and four, whose parents had died and who became a prostitute. Sikazwe said when she talked to the girl about the dangers of prostitution, the girl said, ?AIDS is not a lion I can see, but my brothers are hungry, so I have to work.?
Sikazwe spoke of the power of Zambian women to mobilize, organize and achieve political change, citing demonstrations over the corruption of the country?s past president, who held indemnity. Following the demonstration s, his indemnity was lifted.
On the example of Zambia?s refusal to accept genetically modified maize, Sikazwe said, ?They tell us beggars can?t be choosers, but we refuse to become beggars.?
On the tragedy of child soldiers, conference presenter Fr. Rocco Puopolo, Executive Director, Africa Faith and Justice Network, drew from his experience with child soldiers during Sierra Leone?s brutal conflict. Puopolo said there were child soldiers who had been kidnapped but others who would go voluntarily- a choice Puopolo laid at the footsteps of poverty.
?Sometimes conditions are very bad for kids and they see no hope in their lives. They?re told if they join they?ll get money, but that doesn?t happen. It?s a reflection of the absolute poverty in which they?re living.? Possible legislative initiatives to make child soldiers illegal would be one deterrent to the problem, said Puopolo and co-presenters.
Water for all:
On the future of available and affordable world water resources for current and future generations, United Church of Christ Minister for Environmental Justice Dr. Carlos J. Correa warned that large corporations ? privatization of water resources in many countries- including the U.S.- will mean less access to affordable water for the poor.
Correa included the bottled water business in that warning, saying that in the global south, in countries such as India, large multinationals are appropriating, bottling and selling public water that would otherwise be available to the poor as drinking water.
Presenting with Correa, Kenyan water resources consultant Paul Maina, a Church World Service partner, said community-owned and managed water resources were the empowered alternative to water privatization. Chief executive officer for the Centre for Development Services (CDS), Maina said community-managed water programs go beyond the borehole: they should be sustainable, and ?should have communities be directly involved in the design, process, building and ongoing monitoring of water projects.?
Maina said the key issue is ?to determine affordability so communities can manage and afford to maintain and make changes on their own, beyond the development partners. The communities are willing to shoulder that.?
He warned that water management should be a holistic process, taking environment and development impacts into account.
Turning to Burma, conference presenters Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Associate Director Erol Kekic, Jack Dunford, Executive Director, Thailand Burma Border Consortium, and Simon Billenness, Board Member, US. Burma Campaign, Washington D.C., addressed the Myanmar military junta?s continued killings and attacks on ethnic and religious minorities that have displaced an estimated 1.5 million people.
Kekic, whose agency is resettling Burmese refugees in the U.S., cited the recent failed passage of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Myanmar, which has stimulated heightened grassroots advocacy. U.S. Burma Campaign?s Billenness focused on sanction against Burma and two pieces of U.S. legislation governing sanctions and spoke of information trips to the Burma-Thai border that his organization conducts. Quoting imprisoned Burmese patriot Aung San Suu Kyi, he urged activists, ?Use your freedom to promote ours.?
A delegation of high ranking Christian leaders and civil society advocates from the Philippines presented extensively at Ecumenical Advocacy Days on the island nation?s escalating extra-judicial killings, environmental degradations and labor exploitation by foreign corporations including retail giant Wal-Mart.
The Filipino delegation is releasing a new report on human rights in the Philippines this week in Washington, Wednesday (March 14) to the Senate Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA); to members of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA); and through Wednesday at a related International Ecumenical Conference on Human Rights in the Philippines.
NCC?s Bob Edgar paid tribute:
At the conference?s closing Sunday night, National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC) General Secretary Bob Edgar led the charge for the activists? lobby day, telling them ?We don?t have to take a vote as to whether God cares about children. ?Do unto elected officials as if you were elected officials,? he said. ?Talk from your heart about peace and poverty and healthcare and children . . . about the children of Baghdad and Darfur and Afghan and New Orleans.?
Edgar, who leaves his NCC post after eight high profile years, was honored by the ecumenical symposium?s announcement of the endowed Rev. Dr. Bob Edgar Scholarship Fund, to awarded to one young person each year for attendance at the Ecumenical Advocacy Days Conference.
Opening the conference Friday night, Rev. John L. McCullough, Executive Director of humanitarian agency Church World Service, paid tribute to the impacts made by the Christian ecumenical community and past Ecumenical Advocacy Days conferences in stimulating U.S. policy changes for the poor.
He included previous conference pushes that contributed to defeat of the Administration?s nuclear weapon bunker buster plan; the passing of legislation to raise the U.S. minimum wage; agreement by the U.S to increase its contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria; and in seeing that the principle of 100 percent debt cancellation for poor countries was accepted and implemented by multilateral financial institutions including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
McCullough said the ecumenical community still has a large agenda of unfinished business to bring to the U.S., saying the faith bodies? successes give strong basis for future ones.
A fitting conference close, a member of the EAD conference planning team, Curtis Ramsey-Lucas, National Coordinator - Public and Social Advocacy, American Baptist Churches USA, and musician colleagues from University Baptist Church in College Park, Maryland, performed Songs of Faith and Justice.
The only event of its kind held in the U.S. that gathers national and international faith and grassroots activists, Ecumenical Advocacy Days is representative of the broader movement of people of faith who believe that poverty is a pressing moral issue that must be addressed as a top priority on the U.S. agenda.
For more information about the Ecumenical Advocacy Days Conference, visit: www.advocacydays.org
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EDITORS NOTE: High res photos with cut lines available on request.
CONTACTS:
Jan Dragin/Church World Service - 24/7 - (781) 925-1526, jdragin@gis.net Michael Neuroth, Ecumenical Advocacy Days, (202) 230-2276, michael_neuroth@ hotmail.com