Africa

A selection of the week's best photos from across the African continent.

A selection of the week's best photos from across the African continent.

A selection of the week's best photos from across the African continent.

Paul Kagame wins with more than 99% of the vote, showing Rwanda's lack of democracy, his critics say.

By CIVICUS
Jul 18 2024 (IPS)

 
CIVICUS discusses abortion rights in Brazil with Guacira Oliveira, director of the Feminist Centre for Studies and Advice (CFEMEA). CFEMEA is an anti-racist feminist organisation that defends women’s rights, collective care and self-care and monitors developments in Brazil’s National Congress.

In June, thousands of women took to the streets of São Paulo and other cities to protest against a bill that would classify abortion after 22 weeks as homicide, punishable by six to 20 years in prison. Protests began when the lower house of Congress fast-tracked the bill, limiting debate. Abortion is currently legal in Brazil only in cases of rape, foetal malformation or danger to the life of a pregnant person. The proposed bill, promoted by evangelical representatives, would criminalise people who have abortions more severely than rapists. Public reaction has slowed down the bill’s progress and its future is now uncertain.

How would this new anti-abortion law, if passed, affect women?

Currently, abortion is legal in Brazil only in cases of rape, danger to a pregnant person’s life and severe foetal malformation. However, current legislation doesn’t set a maximum gestational age for access to legal abortion. The proposed bill would equate abortion after 22 weeks of pregnancy with homicide, punishing the person seeking the abortion and the health professionals who perform it.

This would particularly affect girls, as over 60 per cent of rape victims are children under the age of 13. In more than 64 per cent of these cases, the rapist is someone close to the girl’s family, making it difficult to identify the rape and the resulting pregnancy.

Another perverse aspect of the problem is racial inequality. Forty per cent of rape victims are Black children and adolescents, and of those under 13, more than 56 per cent are Black girls. Of 20,000 girls under the age of 14 who give birth each year, 74 per cent are Black. In addition, Black women are 46 per cent more likely to have an abortion than white women. The passage of this bill would make Black women and girls even more vulnerable than they already are. The law should protect these women and girls, not criminalise them.

How has civil society mobilised against the bill?

CFEMEA has been monitoring threats to legal abortion for decades and is part of the National Front Against the Criminalisation of Women and for the Legalisation of Abortion. Threats increased with the rise of the far right to the presidency in 2018, and feminist movements mobilised over cases of girls who were victims of sexual violence and faced institutional barriers to accessing legal abortion.

In 2023, in response to regressive legislation, they launched the ‘A child is not a mother‘ platform, recently reactivated as the new anti-abortion bill was submitted as a matter of urgency. More than 345,000 people signed up to the campaign and sent messages to parliamentarians. They also applied pressure on social media through posts and hashtags such as #criançanémãe (#ChildNotMother), #PLdagravidezinfantil (#CongressForChildPregnancy) and #PLdoestupro (#CongressForRape).

We also campaigned through face-to-face actions and other collectively defined strategies, led mainly by state-level alliances against the criminalisation of women and for the legalisation of abortion. In May, we laid a symbolic wreath in front of the Federal Council of Medicine, which in April had published a resolution banning foetal asystole, a procedure recommended by the World Health Organization for legal abortions after 22 weeks. By doing so we symbolised our grief for all the women and girls whose lives are cut short due to lack of access to a legal abortion. We reenacted this outside the official residence of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, just before the fast-track request for the anti-abortion bill was approved, on the evening of 12 June.

The following day, the first public protests took place in several Brazilian state capitals. These continued over subsequent days, culminating in a nationwide action on 27 June. The issue is still on the agenda in July and demonstrations are still going strong.

Why is Brazil moving against the regional trend towards legalisation?

Brazil has seen advances by the religious fundamentalist far right since 2016, when President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office through a legal-parliamentary manoeuvre that amounted to a political coup. The violent ethnocentric, LGBTQI+-phobic, neopatriarchal and racist reaction intensified in 2018 with the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in an election marred by disinformation.

Conservatives view the rights to diverse and plural ways of life as a threat to their existence. In this sense, their regressive proposals are a direct response to women’s struggles against patriarchy and all forms of women’s oppression.

Even after its defeat in the 2022 presidential election, the far right has become stronger in the National Congress, where extremists have obtained majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. This has led to the revival of a bill known as the ‘Statute of the Unborn Child’, aimed at granting ‘personhood’ to the foetus in order to criminalise abortion.

Many factors explain the conservative reaction in Brazil and around the world. For fascists in power and in society, violence is justified against groups considered to be ‘enemies of the people’, which can include any dissenting voices – those of women, Black people, Indigenous peoples and LGBTQI+ people. In the case of women, they are trying to re-domesticate us, to send us back home, subservient to the command and judgement of patriarchs. Control over reproduction and our bodies is a crucial part of this strategy.

What are the forces for and against sexual and reproductive rights in Brazil?

The main force against sexual and reproductive rights is religious fundamentalism, which positions itself as a harbinger of control over women’s bodies and gender dissidents and is strongly represented in the National Congress. The defence of these rights lies in the progressive camp, represented by the political left and the feminist, women’s and LGBTQI+ movements.

But it’s worth noting that even with a Congress besieged by anti-rights groups, most people have a less punitive and more empathetic understanding of feminist struggles and women’s rights. A survey we carried out in 2023, in collaboration with the Observatory of Sex and Politics and the Centre for Studies and Public Opinion of the State University of Campinas, showed that 59 per cent were against the criminalisation and possible imprisonment of women who have abortions.

What are the main demands of the Brazilian feminist movement?

The feminist movement is plural and diverse, but what it has in common is the fight to end all forms of violence against women. CFEMEA seeks to transform the world through anti-racist feminism and by taking a stand against all gender inequalities and oppression. This is our position when we enter dialogue with society and make demands of governments. We demand public policies that reduce inequalities between men, women and people with other gender identities, considered in their intersectional dimensions of age, creed, ethnicity, nationality, physical abilities and race, among others.

A fundamental issue is the sexual and racial division of labour, a powerful structure that maintains and exacerbates the inequalities experienced by women. After all, the care work they do, despite being rendered invisible and devalued by patriarchal capitalism, is an indispensable condition for human life and the construction of collective good living. The manifesto of the Anti-Racist Feminist Forum for a National Care Policy, signed by dozens of movements and organisations, affirms the need for social reproduction activities to be recognised and shared by the state. This means that care work, which is currently unpaid and done at the family and community levels almost exclusively by women, must be effectively taken over by the state, because care is a human need.

We demand that governments allocate public investment to combat gender inequalities in areas as diverse as care, culture, education, the environment, health, justice, labour, leisure and wellbeing. It is the state, not the market, that can and must combat such inequalities.

Civic space in Brazil is rated ‘obstructed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor.

Get in touch with CFEMEA via its website or its Facebook or Instagram page, and follow @cfemea on Twitter.

 

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The police said it was difficult to ensure safety as the protests have no designated leader.

Credit: UNOCHA A mosque in Gaza City lies in ruins.

By Mouin Rabbani
MONTREAL, Canada, Jul 18 2024 (IPS)

Usama bin Laden once claimed that the seeds of 9/11 were planted in 1982 as he watched the scenes of mass slaughter emerging out of Beirut’s Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, the bloody conclusion of that summer’s US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Either Bin Laden’s statement was accurate, or he recognized that appealing to the widespread outrage generated by Western support for Israel’s serial atrocities was the most effective way to generate popular and organizational support for his extremist project.

Bin Laden’s successors are no doubt doing everything they can to capture similar outrage throughout the region about Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. But they will encounter significantly greater challenges deploying it for their own purposes.

The difference between 2024 and 1982 is the overwhelming evidence of popular Western rejection of the policies of their governments. In public opinion polls, in mass demonstrations easily rivalling those organised against the illegal 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, in the numerous campus encampments, and, as the recent Letter of Dissent shows, extending even to government bureaucracies and political appointees.

The distinction between ruler and ruled, government and governed, has rarely been more clearly exposed.

The Letter of Dissent makes indisputably clear that US policy towards the present crisis has been an absolute failure at virtually every level. Not only has it failed to achieve any of its objectives and further consolidate Western hegemony in the Middle East, but it has made the US government directly and actively complicit in the genocide currently before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

As the signatories note, the US is “wilfully” violating not only international laws that are binding upon Washington, but is similarly and knowingly violating US domestic law in its fanatic determination to see Israel’s mass atrocities through to the bitter end.

Tellingly, and quite accurately, they also point out that the Biden administration’s determination to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ultra-rightist, annexationist government has led to the suppression of basic constitutional freedoms within the United States.

That campaign, which has involved Ivy League presidents being forced to resign, students and faculty punished for condemning a foreign state, journalists losing their jobs, and much else, has far exceeded anything observed during the US wars against Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

Calling for the destruction of the United States is, it seems, constitutionally protected speech, but this right that does not extend to calling for the dismantling of a genocidal, supremacist regime located thousands of miles away.

Civil servants, even senior ones, generally have at best marginal influence on policy, particularly in a plutocracy like the United States. In the current context, where US Middle East policy is the personal preserve of Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, McGurk, and very few others, their influence is non-existent.

This explains why the signatories felt they were left with no option other than to resign. To have done otherwise would have made them complicit in their government’s policies, including its participation in Israeli crimes and ceaseless efforts to ensure Israeli impunity for atrocities against the Palestinian people.

The moral and political choice they have made, which must have been agonizingly difficult and exceptionally simple in equal proportion, is one to be admired.

Mouin Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, Non-Resident Fellow with the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS), and Non-Resident Fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Namibian authorities are said to be unhappy at the harassment of their diplomatic officials.

Women farmers in Helambu, Sindhupalchwok. Women, who are the primary growers, have to deal with changing patterns of snowfall and rain, which is affecting their agricultural activities. However, they feel like no one is listening to their concerns. Credit: Tanka Dhakal/IPS

By Tanka Dhakal
KATHMANDU, Jul 18 2024 (IPS)

A group aligned with the mayor of Chhayanath Rara Municipality in the Mugu district of Nepal’s Karnali Province physically attacked Aishwarya Malla for simply asking for a budgetary review of the local government.

“As a deputy mayor, I have the right to know where the budget is allocated, but the mayor’s team attacked me,” Malla said. “They did it only because I’m a woman, but they forget I’m also an elected representative with a responsibility to serve people, especially women and marginalized sections of our society.”

Malla has had an upward battle trying to get her voice heard.

Earlier in May, she requested just a few minutes to lay out her area’s issues related to climate change. She was in the nation’s capital, Kathmandu, where the International Dialogue on Climate Change was happening.

“If you want to know the ground reality, you have to give time to speak,” she said in her loud, passionate voice, but she didn’t get the chance. “We represent the women and lower sections of society, and nobody listens or wants to give us space.”

In Nepal, local governments have the responsibility to be the first and most accessible authority to serve people, and elected representatives run their constituencies.

In leadership positions (mayor and their deputies or presidents and their vice presidents), women’s representation as candidates is mandatory for political parties. However, only 25 local governments have women serving as either mayors or presidents. Out of 753 local governments, 557 have women as deputy mayors or vice presidents.

Largely, women leaders are forced to remain second in line of power. But as Malla says, women leaders are the ones whom people in need reach out to, but they struggle to find their space within the male-dominant local political sphere.

Aishwarya Malla (left), Deputy Mayor of Chhayanath Rara Municipality, and Shanti Malla Bhandari (right), Vice President of Guthichaur Rural Municipality. Credit: Tanka Dhakal/IPS

“This is affecting our efforts to find solutions and adaptive measures to the climate change impact in our community and the same is true of other issues too,” Malla said, expressing her frustrations.

Local Struggle on National Platform

During the International Expert Dialogue on Mountains, People, and Climate, organized by the government of Nepal on May 22–23, experts discussed the importance of locally led adaptation to tackle the impacts of climate change in the community. However, there was no representation from the local community.

Apsara Lamsal Lamichhane, vice president of Helambu Rural Municipality, Sindhupalchowk district, stood up and expressed her frustrations when the floor was opened for questions.

“We are the ones who are suffering from the dire impacts of climate change, and we are trying to find a way to adapt,” Lamichhane angrily said as her microphone was about to be cut off. “But the central government doesn’t even listen to us, and we don’t get a chance to present our ground reality on platforms like this.”

Apsara Lamsal Lamichhane, Vice President of Helambu Rural Municipality, Sindhupalchowk, during the International Expert Dialogue on Mountains, People, and Climate. Credit: Tanka Dhakal/IPS

She comes from one of the most vulnerable areas, where locals are facing the direct impacts of disasters exacerbated by climate change.

Lamichhane, Malla and other women in deputy mayor or vice president posts share the same complaint: that the provincial and central governments don’t listen to their concerns, including the losses caused by climate change.

“At the local level, the Mayor or President tries to silence us. In national discussions like this, we are invited but not allowed to speak. It’s our reality,” says Shanti Kumari Malla Bhandari, vice president of Guthicahur Rural Municipality in Jumla.

The Same Story on the International Stage

Just as there are internal obstacles to getting even a few minutes to present the issues local communities on the frontlines are dealing with, experts and leaders at the national level complain that in international climate forums, their voices are suppressed, and they don’t get enough space to present the reality of the climate plight.

Former Foreign Minister Dr. Bimala Rai Paudyal acknowledges that there is much to do to foster smooth discussion internally and to create a listening environment.

“We are working in isolation; there is an inter-ministerial communication gap, and yes, local representatives have to struggle much to make their voices heard,” Paudyal, who advocates for women’s representation in climate change discussions, says.

“Women are not only frontline victims of the climate crisis but also the first responders. We need to give them space, and then we can make our case in international forums. But there is a long way to go.”

To have better negotiation power in global forums, internal discussions need to prioritize local voices, she says. If we listen to each other here, then we can raise our collective voice with much conviction in international forums like the Conference of the Parties (COP) and climate finance committees.

According to Raju Pandit Chhetri, who works on climate finance negotiation, for countries like Nepal that are dependent on donor countries and agencies, negotiating on the global stage is not easy.

“There is already a giver-receiver relationship, and our psyche may be hesitant to negotiate strongly on climate finance issues. I think that kind of mentality may also exist at the national level too,” climate finance expert Chhetri said. “We have to break that wall of hesitation both internally and on the global stage.”

Note: This feature is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Silenced and sidelined, women politicians in Nepal fight for their voices to be heard, especially as they represent a population most impacted by climate change.

Lidia Brito, UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
ADDIS ABABA, Jul 18 2024 (IPS)

Scientific research has led to social and economic gains worldwide, but the scientists who make it happen face significant challenges.

Science propels development, yet scientists need the freedom to research and advance technology and innovation. Is scientific freedom a cornerstone of development for African countries to remain globally competitive?”

Constraining Science

Growing societal polarization, erosion of democratic processes, and a rise in populism, misinformation, and disinformation are some of the factors curtailing scientific freedom in Africa, a new report by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has found.

In a study, African Perspectives on Scientific Freedom, launched at the Sixth Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in April 2024, UNESCO, highlights worrying trends that have increased pressure on the freedom and safety of scientists.

“When the voices of scientists are silenced, or societies’ ability to produce relevant and unbiased knowledge, to think critically, and to distinguish truth from falsehood is undermined. Without the freedom and safety of scientists, the trust in science and culture of science-driven decision-making are eroded,” said Gabriel Ramos, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Social and Human  Sciences, in a foreword to the study.

UNESCO developed a Recommendation for Science and Scientific Researchers, which noted that for science to reach its full potential, it is crucial that scientists “work in a spirit of intellectual freedom to seek, explain and defend scientific truth as they perceive it and enjoy the protection of their autonomous judgment against undue influence.”

This followed findings that scientific freedom is being constrained by among other factors, declining civic discourse and armed conflicts. As a result of these constraints, UNESCO launched a new programme on the promotion of scientific freedom and the safety of scientists in 2023 to collect data to inform decision-making.

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts the rights of all individuals to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” While the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights calls for the protection of the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its application. The Convention explicitly refers to scientific freedom in requiring member states to undertake to respect the ‘freedom indispensable to scientific research’.

There is a caveat. UNESCO says scientific freedom must be exercised alongside responsibility, which is the duty of scientists to conduct and apply science with integrity, in the interest of humanity, in a spirit of stewardship for the environment, and with respect for human rights.

Science ecosystems in Africa are operating in a challenging environment, underscoring the need to restore trust in science and the recognition of scientists in advancing human development, UNESCO says.

Highlighting the restrictions of research freedom, Acting Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Daya Reddy, who reviewed the African Perspectives on Scientific Freedom report, noted the need for increased collaboration between scientists and policymakers to foster science, technology, and innovation.

Reddy said the study focus area was for Africa to develop guidelines and recommendations on scientific freedom after gaining a better understanding of the state of scientific freedom in six African countries profiled under the pilot study. The study assessed scientific freedom in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. It found that scientific freedom was not uniformly understood and appreciated in different national contexts, which necessitated the creation of a robust framework of laws and policies to promote research and publication.

A lack of resources and a critical mass were identified as some factors impinging on scientific freedom which did not have an explicit profile or presence in policies and legal frameworks in the six countries. This is despite the fact that most national constitutions protected a range of human rights and freedoms, such as the freedom of expression, opinion, and information, but were silent on scientific freedom. The Democratic Republic of Congo is an exception and asserts in its constitution, the freedom of access to research results, while protecting the interests of its authors.

Despite representing 12.5 percent of the global population, Africa was contributing less than one percent to global research output and the continent was spending even less on Research and Development. In 2006, African Heads of State and government agreed to commit one percent of the national GDP to research and development to boost scientific innovation. However, none of the African countries have met this threshold, pointing to pervasive low spending on scientific research in Africa.

Building a culture of science

We need to build a culture of science to accelerate sustainable development in Africa, says Lidia Brito, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences. She argues that scientists play a crucial role in promoting the well-being of society and for science to deliver its full potential, scientists must be able to work freely, without any restrictions.

“Science needs space to develop. There is also the need to interact with society to understand their needs and then through scientific endeavors to come up with solutions but in a co-designer, co-participating mode, Brito told IPS, emphasizing that guaranteeing that scientists have the freedom in terms of finance and infrastructure, and the space to develop their scientific programmes is key.

“We want science and scientists to be these heroes who come up with solutions to the pressing challenges we are facing globally,” Brito said.

But how do we promote the culture of science given that in Africa there is poor investment in research and development?

The UNESCO report, African Perspectives on Scientific Freedoms, calls for more investment in science, in scientific organizations, and the training of more researchers in Africa. This will be possible through an enabling environment that fosters the growth of science and scientists to operate.

“It is also about protecting the profession of scientists and about creating a conducive environment to retain the scientists in the scientific career, which is particularly important for women scientists, Brito said, adding that many times women start their careers in science but then leave because the work environment is not conducive for them.

The study noted the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, and research in Africa as an issue that needed to be addressed. Fewer than 31 percent of scientists in Sub-Saharan Africa are women, according to UNESCO.

Plugging the brain drain

Besides, Africa is experiencing a brain drain of its scientists, attracted by better conditions in other countries, especially the global North. The World Economic Forum (WEF) found that Africa has fewer than 100 scientists per million inhabitants and will need to increase this to the global average of 800 by training millions of scientists, technicians, and engineers to post-graduate levels over the next few years.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Impeached judge John Hlophe is set to lead opposition to President Ramaphosa's coalition government.

Impeached judge John Hlophe is set to lead opposition to President Ramaphosa's coalition government.

Impeached judge John Hlophe is set to lead opposition to President Ramaphosa's coalition government.

Marixela Ramos and Fausto Gámez in the village of El Rodeo, northern El Salvador, where a solar-powered drinking water system has been in operation since 2018. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
VICTORIA, El Salvador, Jul 17 2024 (IPS)

Setting up a community water project with a solar-powered pumping system was an unlikely idea for the peasant families of a Salvadoran village who, despite their doubts, turned it into reality and now have drinking water in their homes.

In El Rodeo, a hamlet in the municipality of Victoria, in the department of Cabañas, drinking water was an urgent need, as the government does not provide it to peasant villages like this one, in northern El Salvador. According to official figures, 34% of the rural population lacks piped water in their homes.

So the community had to organise itself to provide water from local springs. But when the board of directors of El Rodeo, in charge of the project, informed that the pumping system would be solar powered in order to reduce costs, there was some collective disappointment.

“When solar energy was mentioned, the people’s big dream of water… went up in smoke, they didn’t believe,” Marixela Ramos, an inhabitant of El Rodeo, who saw the project come to life when it was conceived as a “dream” between 2005 and 2008, told IPS."Before, we had to go to the wells and rivers to fetch water. Now it is easier, we get the water at once in the house": Ana Silvia Alemán.

But that was the most viable option at the time in the village dedicated to subsistence farming.

“Since there are only a few families, it would not be financially sustainable if we connected it to the national power grid,” added Ramos, 39, who is the secretary general of the El Rodeo board of directors.

Ramos is also involved in other community spaces, mostly linked to the promotion of women’s rights, as well as shows on Radio Victoria, a station that for decades has given voice to the demands of communities in the area.

Despite the disbelief of many villagers, work began in 2017 and the village’s water system was inaugurated in 2018, benefiting around 80 families, including those living in La Marañonera, another nearby town.

The El Rodeo project is the most innovative, having solar energy, but other villages in this area of the department of Cabañas are supplied with water from their own community initiatives, through the so-called Juntas de Agua, or Water Boards. The largest of these is Santa Marta, where some 800 families live.

Other rural communities do the same throughout the country, given the government’s inefficiency in providing the service to the country’s population of 6.7 million inhabitants.

There are an estimated 2,500 such Water Boards in El Salvador, providing service to 25% of the population, or 1.6 million people.

Ana Silvia Alemán, 45, washes a pitcher in El Rodeo, a subsistence farming village in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Water for all

The system in El Rodeo is supplied by a nearby spring known as Agua Caliente. Since it was located on private land, the water had to be purchased from the owner for US$5,000, with funds from international organisations.

From there the water is redirected to a catchment tank, with a capacity of 28 cubic metres. A five-horsepower pump then sends it to a distribution tank, located on top of a hill, from where it is gravity-fed through pipes to the users.

Families are entitled to about 10 cubic metres per month, equivalent to 10,000 litres, for which they pay five dollars.

As a roof, at a height of about five metres, 32 solar panels were mounted to provide the energy that drives the pumping system.

“Before, we had to go to the wells and rivers to fetch water. Now it is easier, we get the water at once in the house,” Ana Silvia Alemán, 45, told IPS as she washed some containers with the water from the tap at her home.

José Amílcar Hernández, 26, is in charge of the technical operation of the water system installed in his community, El Rodeo, in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

The water service is available two days a week from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., weather permitting. A distribution tank with more capacity than the current 54 cubic metres would be needed to extend those hours, Amílcar Hernández, who is responsible for the technical operation of the system, told IPS.

“That is one of the improvements pending. We estimate a tank of about 125 cubic metres is needed,” said Hernández, 26, who also works as a maize farmer, performs in a small community theatre group, and produces shows for Radio Victoria.

Several Salvadoran and international organisations participated in the construction of the water system in El Rodeo, including the Washington Ethical Society, the Spanish City Council of Bilbao, Ingeniería sin Fronteras and the Rotary Club.

The villagers contributed many hours of work in return.

Apart from water supply, the project included other related aspects, such as the construction of composting latrines, so as not to pollute the aquifers, as they produce organic fertiliser from the decomposition of excrement.

In each house, a mechanism was also designed to filter grey water by redirecting it to a small underground chamber with several layers of sand. The filtered water is used to irrigate small vegetable gardens or “bio-gardens”.

One of the tanks from which drinking water is distributed to families in Santa Marta, the largest village in the municipality of Victoria, department of Cabañas, in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A place of struggle and hope

The history of El Rodeo is linked to the Salvadoran civil war, between 1980 and 1992. Clean drinking water was the main goal that families set for themselves when they returned from exile after that conflict.

El Rodeo is one of several villages in Cabañas and other Salvadoran departments whose families had to flee in the 1980s because of the war, and the place was the target of constant army attacks. Several massacres against civilians took place in this locality.

They fled mainly to Mesa Grande, a camp of more than 11,000 Salvadoran refugees established by the United Nations in San Marcos Ocotepeque, Honduras.

The civil war left an estimated 70,000 people dead and more than 8,000 missing. The conflict ended in February 1992, when a peace agreement was signed.

However, before the war ended, and amidst the bullets and bombings, groups of families began to return to their place of origin, and thus El Refugio began to repopulate, in four waves: in 1987, 1988, 1999, and the last one in March 1992.

“I was born here, in El Rodeo, but we had to move to Mesa Grande, like everyone else. We came back 32 years ago, to try to live in peace in our hamlet,” said Alemán, filling the pitchers she had just finished washing.

A characteristic of villages like El Rodeo is their high level of organisation, perhaps learned during the war years. Many peasants were part of the guerrillas, who had a strict way of organising themselves to carry out common tasks.

The environmental struggle against the mining industry installed in the country in the first decade of the 2000s emerged on the lands of the municipality of Victoria. Thanks to this pressure, El Salvador was the first country in the world to pass a law banning metal mining, in March 2017.

“This level of organisation has meant that we now have projects such as water, education, health and security programmes,” Fausto Gámez, 33, chairman of the community’s board of directors, told IPS.

In addition to his role in the water system, Gámez also does community journalism for Radio Victoria, and coordinates the sexual diversity collective in Santa Marta, the largest settlement in the area.

Radio Victoria is the community station that for decades has given voice to the struggles and demands of the communities and families of Cabañas, in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Challenges to overcome

The water supply system of El Rodeo has room for improvement. As it is photovoltaic powered, it stops when the weather prevents sunlight from heating the panels, especially during the rainy season from May to November.

“Having a solar-powered water project has its pros, but also its cons: sometimes the weather doesn’t allow us to have water, we depend on the sun,” explained Gámez, adding that this is a recurring complaint.

Technically, the ideal system should be hybrid, meaning that it can be connected to the national power grid when needed.

But that would represent a costly investment for the community, which it cannot afford. Moreover, the families would have to absorb the cost and pay a higher monthly fee.

However, while the interruption of service due to bad weather is a nuisance, some families manage to endure these days of shortages by saving the water they have previously stored.

“We try to consume only what we need, and as there are only two of us in the family, we have enough water,” said Alemán.

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Confrontation with a Deep Sea Mining Ship in the at-risk Pacific Region.
 
Greenpeace International activists from around the world have paddled and protested around MV COCO, a specialized offshore drilling vessel currently collecting data for deep sea mining frontrunner, The Metals Company, on its last expedition before it files the world’s first ever application to mine the seabed in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Martin Katz / Greenpeace

By Sebastian Losada
A CORUNA, Spain, Jul 17 2024 (IPS)

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) has enormous importance as responsible for the fate of the largest, and most untouched, biome on the Planet. Ahead of elections for its leadership, governments cannot ignore that its current Secretary-General has become the subject of both media investigations and criticism from other parts of the UN.

Michael Lodge faces numerous allegations such as a lack of impartiality, closeness to the mining industry, financial mismanagement, mistreatment of media, and attempts to silence protest. Even if some of these are generally disputed by Mr. Lodge, if he were re-elected, the credibility and independence of the ISA, an important organisation in the UN multilateral system, is seriously compromised.

The ISA, an autonomous organisation established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is currently negotiating a set of rules that could allow large-scale extraction of mineral resources in the deep ocean. These negotiations are taking place amidst growing environmental concerns and public opposition to the harm that deep sea mining will cause to marine ecosystems we critically rely on.

Credit: Greenpeace

A long list of media scandals

The upcoming meeting of the ISA Assembly, from 29 July to 2 August, will elect a Secretary-General. Michael Lodge, a British national who will complete his second term this year, is campaigning to be re-elected upon nomination by Kiribati. So far, the only alternative candidate is Brazilian oceanographer Laeticia Carvalho.

On 4 July, a new exposé released by The New York Times contained strong accusations of interference in the campaign process as well as of financial mismanagement. In the article, Kiribati’s Ambassador Teburoro Tito confirms that he offered Ms Carvalho a high level position at the ISA in exchange for dropping out of the race.

Carvalho denounces Lodge for using the ISA machinery for his election campaign. The article quotes allegations by former ISA employees of misuse of the organisation’s funds and plans from the German Government to scrutinise “questionable financial activities at the ISA.”

Media coverage highlighting misconduct at the ISA during the mandates of Michael Lodge includes pieces in NYT, LA Times, The Guardian and Bloomberg. Media attention perhaps reached a peak-high when American talk-show John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight dedicated a special issue to deep sea mining aired on 13 June. The video is approaching 3 million views on the show’s Youtube channel.

Lack of impartiality and closeness to the industry

Many of these media reports relate to Michael Lodge’s alleged closeness to the mining industry. As explained in March 2023 by “diplomats from Germany, Costa Rica and elsewhere” Lodge, supposed to be a neutral facilitator, “has stepped out of line by resisting efforts by some Council members that could slow approval of the first mining proposal.”

On 16 March 2023, Germany’s Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Franziska Brantner, reminded in a letter, that “it is not the task of the Secretariat to interfere in the decision-making of subsidiary organs of the ISA,” expressing disappointment that Lodge had “actively taken a stand against positions and decision making proposals from individual delegations.”

Perhaps the most serious accusation belongs to the NYT’s “Secret Data, Tiny Islands and a Quest for Treasure on the Ocean Floor” which in August 2022 exposed “interviews and hundreds of pages of emails, letters and other internal documents” showing that the ISA “provided data identifying some of the most valuable seabed tracts, and then set aside the prized sites for the [The Metals Company] company’s future use.”

Lodge’s closeness with the industry had been called out earlier. In 2018, he appeared in a promotional video of DeepGreen (now operating as The Metals Company). The video is not public anymore from its original host Vimeo, but can still be found in an LA Times article, which notes that “a big selling point at a time the company was courting investors, was the man shown walking on a massive ship and speaking of the need to mine the ocean floor: the Secretary-General of the ISA.”

According to the article, a bar tab in 2018 for a group of 15 attended by mining executives, which included $95 bottles of wine, came to $1,230, “according to a receipt and expense report filed with the secretariat.”

Sandor Mulsow, a marine geologist who served as the ISA’s head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources for more than five years, until 2019, described the work of the ISA as having “a huge bias in favour of new contractors.” “It is like to ask the wolf to take care of the sheep,” he said to LA Times.

At a hearing in the Belgian Parliament in June 2020, Lodge told parliamentarians that a moratorium, now supported by 26 ISA member States, “would be anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-development and anti-international law.” Not surprisingly, in 2020 a Radio New Zealand programme referred to Lodge as a “cheerleader” for mining interests. In response, he threatened a defamation lawsuit.

An aggressive environment for media and observers

During Lodge’s mandates, the ISA has become an increasingly difficult environment for media and civil society observers. Lodge has vocally criticised those questioning deep-sea mining, promulgated new and restrictive guidelines for observers at ISA meetings and restricted media access.

In a speech in 2018 to businesses in Hamburg, Lodge said he was disturbed by “wildly inaccurate and distorted scenarios portrayed by some sections of the media and interest groups,” saying that concerns on environmental damage resulting from deep sea mining are “grossly exaggerated and lack any basis in fact.”

In June 2021, at an International Law Conference in Singapore, Lodge talked of “a growing environmental absolutism and dogmatism bordering on fanaticism.”

Journalists who travelled all the way to Kingston to cover the ISA negotiations have expressed their dismay about how they were treated. In March 2023, Washington Post journalist Evan Halper, who had written pieces critical of the ISA, was escorted out of the negotiating chamber. Lodge has also not refrained from mocking journalists in the past, as he did in response to an article in The Guardian.

In July 2023, Greenpeace International used a spoof version of the ISA logo on billboards, calling on governments to take action to avoid being seen as the “Irresponsible Seabed Authority”. The ISA contacted the billboard agency to demand that it be withdrawn and issued new restrictive guidelines on the functioning of ISA meetings, restricting demonstrations, protests and distribution of publicity materials.

Specific measures related to the “use of the emblem of the Authority” and warned that its unauthorised use “may constitute grounds for removal of accreditation with the Authority.” The new guidelines triggered a letter signed by seven observer organisations demanding the removal of some particularly repressive provisions.

Reactions of other UN agencies and agreements

Last November 2023, Greenpeace International peacefully protested at sea against a mining company’s exploration expedition. On the high seas of the Central Pacific Ocean, activists kayaked around the vessel, and climbed its crane to demand a halt to the company’s plans to start deep sea mining in one of the world’s last untouched ecosystems.

The Secretary-General of the ISA reacted to the Greenpeace protest enacting emergency measures on the basis that the protest with inflatable kayaks was posing a “threat of serious harm to the marine environment” and ordering Greenpeace to abandon the protest, in an evident over-reach of his functions.

This caught the attention of two UN Special Rapporteurs, who had very strong words against Lodge’s attempt to undermine basic civil rights. Dr. Marcos Orellana, Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights, said he was “alarmed by the manner in which the Secretary General of the ISA has responded to a peaceful protest.” Orellana considered these actions “question the impartiality expected from the Secretary-General as much as they suggest bias towards industry interests in disregard of the Environmental Protection Mandate of the ISA.”

In a video message to the ISA membership, Michael Forst, Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention, criticised “the outrageous immediate measures issued by the ISA Secretary General seeking to prevent Greenpeace activists from protesting”, which he considered “yet again another example of the ongoing crackdown on environmental defenders and their freedoms of expression, protest, and assembly.”

As other multilateral institutions have addressed the potential impacts of deep-sea mining on their respective mandates, interventions by the ISA Secretary-General have raised concerns. In February 2024, when the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) had on its agenda a proposal for a resolution on deep sea mining, Lodge sent a letter to its Executive Secretary dismissing the work of the CMS Secretariat.

Lodge requested a review of a CMS document by “several internationally renowned experts”, which found that “the CMS document cannot be considered a credible basis for decision-making.” One of the main co-authors of such review is Samantha Smith who has worked for both The Metals Company predecessor DeepGreen and Belgium mining company, GSR. “We get letters like this all the time,” a member of the CMS Secretariat confided, “but from industrial lobbyists—not the Executive Secretary of a UN body.”

The ISA needs to change course

Under Michael Lodge’s mandate, the ISA has set a pace of negotiations of the mining code that is completely at odds with the uncertainty and lack of sufficient knowledge about the biology and ecology of deep-sea ecosystems.

While scientists are urging for more time, the ISA and a few of its member States are rushing towards commercial exploitation of deep-sea minerals. This pace is also deeply unequitable as most countries lack the financial and human resources required to prepare and contribute to three Council meetings of highly technical negotiations every year.

The ISA has had so far three Secretary-Generals. All male but from three different geographies (the Pacific, Africa and Europe). The ISA has also put a lot of emphasis on gender equality and Michael Lodge presents himself as an “International Gender Champion” at the ISA website. Re-electing Michael Lodge for a third term would not respect well established practices of geographical alternance and representation.

Further, Lodge’s mandates have been tainted with scandals and opacity. As civil society observers we demand an environment of trust, transparency and respect for the different views. This has been lacking.

It is of paramount importance that a new Secretary-General be elected that restores the credibility of the ISA and puts conservation of the deep sea at the heart of the mandate of the Authority. A re-election of the current Secretary-General would risk further eroding trust in this multilateral institution and contributing to a loss of public faith in international regulators more generally.

Sebastian Losada is Senior Oceans Policy Adviser, Greenpeace International.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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