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Closing Session: Youth chorus sings for tomorrow

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Q&A: Ignacio Saiz talks inclusivity, inequality and universal outreach

Ignacio Saiz moderates a roundtable session on U.N. inclusivity post-2015.

Center for Economic and Social Rights Executive Director Ignacio Saiz moderated one of the UN DPI/NGO Conference’s largest roundtables Thursday on the topic of inclusivity, entitled "(Really) Leaving No One Behind." The panel featured an insightful and diverse array of speakers, but we decided to catch up with the moderator himself after the fact to get his take on the topics discussed and the lessons learned from the event.

Cristiano Lima: You assembled a very eclectic panel with a wide arrange of constituencies, but could you speak a little bit about the issues that come with intersectionality and how you feel that past plans have failed in this regard and how you plan to improve upon them?

Ignacio Saiz: On this panel, we heard perspectives from people defending the rights of women, people with disabilities, the rights of young people, etc. and I think the same themes kept coming up, which is that there hasn’t been meaningful inclusion of these perspectives, of these communities and their advocates in the process to shape the agenda until relatively recently.

In terms of learning from mistakes of the past, the MDGs were very blind to issues of inequality and that’s largely because the process of devising the MDGs didn’t include these communities. Now it’s a completely different ball game. We’ve seen how the advocacy done by disability rights groups and others has led to really concrete results… I think that speaks to the importance of inclusion and also the interconnections between different issues of inequality.

People from the floor also raised other issues that weren’t represented on the panel such as discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the rights of migrants. Hopefully events like this serve to build common platforms around those issues and those commonalities.

Lima: I’m a Brazilian-American. I come from two countries where there’s been a continual widening of the wealth gap, as in much of the Western world, and I was wondering if you could talk about that as a detrimental force in achieving equality and what you hope is achieved going forward?

Saiz: I think one of the biggest changes in this process as opposed to the MDGs is that the issue of widening inequality has been named as the issue of our time. Inequality is bad not just for economic growth. Inequality is bad in of itself, in that you have wealth concentration and an increasing number of destitute people and you have a tiny minority accumulating more and more of the wealth, sowing the seeds for human rights problems in the future and for further conflict and social instability and for inequality in access the services.

[In the sustainability plan] there are now some concrete commitments to things that you must do to reduce inequality and they were mentioned on the panel: wage protection, access to decent work and decent employment, progressive tax policies – Brazil is a case in point - it’s only through progressive taxation, fairer taxation that you reduce some of these income disparities.

Lima: We’ve discussed a lot about inclusivity and this was billed as a discussion about targeting the needs of the marginalized, but could you speak about the importance of determining those needs through cooperation with those communities? It’s a tendency of the Western world to dictate what advancements should be taking place abroad, so could you discuss getting that contribution to help people shape their own future?

Saiz: In this particular process member states from across the globe have been engaged and have an equal voice. Of course some states are more powerful than others and, as you say, the Western world tends to have a stronger influence in certain processes than others, but here the views of governments of the South are coming across loud and clear.

However, the real challenge is not representing governments from the South, but representing people at the more grassroots level who are at the forefront, who are facing poverty and deprivation and injustice in their daily lives. We heard a very powerful plea from [panelist] Violet Shiwutse for the voices and experiences of people at the grassroots level, particularly women, to be taken into account into the decisions that are made around the development and implementation of the agenda.

It’s not about including people as beneficiaries or including people as an act of charity. It’s about including people because they are the central agents of their own development and we must never forget that.

-- Cristiano Lima (@ludacristiano)

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Jacqueline Patterson: Energy and Ferguson tragedy are interrelated

Jacqueline Patterson (second from left) with other panelists for a U.N. roundtable on ecosystems, natural resources and sustainability.

Despite being engulfed in community outreach efforts in Ferguson, Missouri following the tragic death of Michael Brown, Jacqueline Patterson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) still found time to speak at the “Urgent! Sustainable Management of Natural Resources and Ecosystems” roundtable. 

Patterson, the Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, said both matters at hand are in fact urgent, and they’re far more connected than one might think.

Having just returned from one Ferguson event and on her way to another, Patterson made a point when interviewed to discuss how both ecosystems - sociopolitical and natural - are suffering from a devaluation of crucial resources.

In one instance: water, food and energy; in the other: young, capable minorities.

“The utter devaluation of black and brown bodies in particular but human rights in general is this pervasive thing that affects our entire ecosystem,” she said of Michael Brown case, in which the victim’s body was left in the street for four hours before finally being removed.

“It’s a situation where the perception of young black people is as a danger at worse and worthless at best just in terms of societal perception,” Patterson added.

She elaborated that this mirrors the depreciation of our natural resources, which are routinely subjected to polluting influences before intervening measures are taken.

To fix these issues, the NAACP Director calls for drastic overhauls, including fundamentally changing the way that law enforcement interacts with minorities and the way that money interacts with environmental policy.

“The fact that we don’t care about our natural resources and that we don’t care for our people is pervasive in nature and the ways that we deal with them have to be fairly comprehensive and have to really acknowledge and address the intersections,” she said.

The two in fact may actually have a hand in remedying one another.

Several panelists during Thursday’s roundtable discussed the importance of creating decent labor to allow the energy industry, for one, to grow while upholding common human rights conventions.

But according to Patterson, currently only 1.1 percent of the energy industry is occupied by African-Americans, and they earn less than one percent of the profits-unable to effectively ascend in the business. This, she says, in spite of the fact African-Americans spend around 40 billion dollars a year on energy consumption, a far larger sum.

This lack of return in investment perpetuates a cycle of exclusion in society.

“The lack of decent work means that people aren’t able to get involved with industrious activities because they don’t have these opportunities to be able to advance,” Patterson said.

But she contends that this pattern could be reversed, if more initiatives were targeted at including African-Americans in the industry, just as the pattern of hostility and violence between minorities and police in the United States could be quelled if addressed with a similar understanding of human valuation.

Patterson says with more of these types of efforts, we could bring the cycle of needless minority criminalization, desperation and altercation finally off the streets.

Hopefully this time we’ll realize: four hours is too long to wait.

-- Cristiano Lima (@ludacristiano)

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Workshop at a Glance: Social media's potential for citizens (and states)

Image via @idlaboha

From the Arab Spring to Nigeria's #BringBackOurGirls campaign and the protests in Kiev, Ukraine, social media has galvanized the way that global citizens of all creeds communicate, organize and initiate change within states and beyond.

Thursday’s “Social Media, Surveillance and Information Wars: Egypt, Tunisia and Ukraine” workshop featured prominent journalists, media officials and social activists fluent in the new revolutionary language that’s shaping our world.

The interactive panel, which encouraged attendees to simultaneously engage in real-time discussions online, united the dialogue about social media with the hashtag #UNDPInfoWars.

These people are true revolutionaries #undpiinfowars #UNngo2014#russiainvadedukrainepic.twitter.com/fF9V9BbUGt

— Jenna L. Vaccaro (@Jenna_Lise)

August 28, 2014

Al-ahram Managing Editor Yehia Zakaria Ghanem said he saw the radical shift from traditional communication toward online, community driven social movements happen firsthand.

“Until 2008 I was skeptical of the ability of social media ...to affect policy change,” he said. “I laughed at the idea of creating citizen journalists.”

His tune quickly changed though. Within six months, those citizen journalists-in-training he’d once scoffed were leading dual lives as students, stay-at-home parents or school teachers and innovative part-time journalists.

“It’s really only been a few years that people have had these immensely powerful tools to communicate from all over the world,” said Jennifer Preston, the New York Times’ first Social Media Editor and current Reporter.

Preston described how citizens used Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and multimedia applications on their cellphones to report about police brutality in Egypt, leading to the massive protests in Tahrir Square in 2011.

She also linked the phenomena to the ongoing protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the death of unarmed African-American Michael Brown.

#Ferguson being brought up at the #UNDPIinfowars workshop. One of the most current examples of citizen journalism at its finest. #UNNGO2014

— Brittany L (@Beelynn213)

August 28, 2014

The real-life impact of these new age media tools became tangible when Ukrainian activist Mariya Soroka gave an impassioned speech about her path from dissatisfied citizen to prominent community organizer.

Ukrainian activist Mariya Soroka: "I'm not a journalist...I just took part of the revolution [because] I cared." #UNDPIInfoWars #UNNGO2014

— Cristiano Lima (@ludacristiano)

August 28, 2014

Soroka said social media "may still save a nation," but that we must be cautious not to count our triumphs and ignore the struggles that continue to plague our world. “I have friends my age, bright scholars, that are going to fight in a war,” she said of the alleged recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. This gave new meaning to the discussion for some.

The talk wasn’t all revolutionary fervor though.

The New York Times First Amendment Fellow Victoria Baranetsky said social media’s potential isn’t limited to citizens; she said that states and private corporations can and are currently using it to violate civil rights. She and other panelists cautioned those in attendance to not forget that they must continue to fend off not only outright oppression but also more subtle attempts to violate rights to free speech and press.

Ultimately though, as Ghanem demonstrated, social media’s potential for positive social change won the day.

“If you don’t believe in miracles than you’re definitely not a realist,” he said.

-- Cristiano Lima (@ludacristiano)