KWRU Attends World Forum on Communication Rights

On the eve of International Human Rights Day (12/10), the Kensington Welfare Rights Union/ Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, a movement of the poor, homeless, unemployed and people without health care in the United States will present on the violations of economic human rights in the US, and particularly under the Bush Administration.

While the Bush administration continues to make war and hurt people around the world, it is committing grave human rights violations against its own people as well, implementing economic policies that impoverish and kill people across the US (homelessness, unemployment, denial of health care, water and heat, food, education), while at the same time limiting and repressing efforts of the poor and others to speak out on the human rights situation in the US.

The KWRU has sent a delegation to this week's events on the right to media and communication in geneva, to make visible the suffering and struggle of the poor in the US. As the Bush administration violates human rights around the world, there is a "blackout" which is determined to keep conditions of poverty, the poor and our movement for economic human rights INVISIBLE to the world. We have been intentionally disappeared from the world's eyes . We are in Geneva to make ourselves and our movement visible and to look for support from the international community as we build a movement within the US. Our lives depend on our speaking out and telling our story to the world: yet when we speak out we are jailed, threatened, our families are attacked and our children are taken away by the government. Our families and lives are at risk either way, but all we have left is our voice, and so we have come to Geneva to appeal to the world community at this dangerous time in history.

We will be discussing activities such as our recent March for Economic HUman Rights commemorating Dr. MLK, through the south of the United States (the poorest part of the country); our current and past takeovers of abandoned houses, encampments of the homeless and unemployed, (Bushvilles, NAFTAvilles), our upcoming campaign for the human right to health care, our bus tours documenting economic human rights violations across the United States, and strategies in the struggle to defeat the Bush administration during this critical upcoming year, including plans by the KWRU to hold a massive nonviolent march on Opening Day of the Republican National Convention during the summer of 2004.