Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign Participation
in the World Social Forum
January 30, 2005

On Sunday January 30, at the World Social Forum, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) delegation held a workshop entitled “ Economic Human Rights, Not War: Uniting the Poor of the United States with the Poor of the World.” In a multilingual meeting, people from around the world participated in an in-depth discussion about the movement for economic human rights growing in the United States, and about ways movements of the poor and human rights organizations internationally might link up with this movement. The audience included journalists from France, the United States and other countries, anti-debt organizers from Indonesia, participants from Haiti, Vietnam, Brazil and representatives from labor unions and the Piquetero movement of the unemployed from Argentina, who expressed the desire to organize solidarity with the poor in the United States.

We talked about the need for support for a movement in the United States, and especially for human rights defenders from around the world to focus on the PPEHRC’s efforts to expose human rights violations in the US, because if the economic model doesn’t work in the US, if millions of people are without medical care, housing, education, water, heat and food in the richest country in the world, how will it work anywhere? In the face of this situation, and in a world context in which major efforts are being made to isolate the poor of the United States from the poor of the world, through war and devastating “free trade” economic policies, the unity between the poor of the United States and our brothers and sisters worldwide, is all the more essential to counter this strategy to truly build our vision of “another world.”

Following our workshop, we had a very significant meeting with Cesare Ottolini of the International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAI), who is based in Italy. We talked about the formation of a worldwide Zero Evictions Campaign ( link http://www.habitants.org/) This meeting was a follow-up to Cesare’s invitation to the KWRU and the PPEHRC to join in this effort and to help issue an appeal to movements internationally to participate, an invitation which we gladly accepted. We shared with Cesare the struggle of the Chicago Coalition to Protect Public Housing, a member of the PPEHRC, to stop the forced eviction of thousands of families from public housing in Chicago (link?), and he agreed to use the Zero Evictions Campaign and the IAI website and network to help support the Coalition and to build international awareness of this and other fights for the right to housing in the US. We passed on to him a copy of the petition which the PPEHRC (with the coalition as a major part) has entered into the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States, requesting a hearing on the violation of the human right to housing in the US, Canada and Brazil (a request that was granted the next day, with a hearing that will take place on March 4 th - link ). Our delegation expressed our willingness to help to build this campaign, including helping with the website of the Zero Evictions Campaign and the IAI.

As we met with Cesare, we also met Father Daniele, an Italian missionary who is working with the hundreds of thousands of families in Nairobi, Kenya who are confronting efforts to massively evict them. In particular, we talked about plans to attend the next World Social Forum in Kenya, and to bring a delegation of the poor from the United States to have an exchange with the poor there, who like us are fighting against forced evictions, for their human right to housing and other basic necessities.