Oct 10, 2014
Labor and human rights activist and long-time Solidarity Center ally Kailash Satyarthi won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel committee announced this morning. He shares the prestigious award with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who survived a brutal 2012 Taliban attack for her stance on girls’ education.
As a grassroots activist, Satyarthi has led the rescue of more than 78,500 child laborers and survived numerous attacks on his life as a result. As a PBS profile describes Satyarthi’s work: “His original idea was daring and dangerous. He decided to mount raids on factories—factories frequently manned by armed guards—where children and often entire families were held captive as bonded workers.”
Solidarity Center Asia Regional Director Tim Ryan said, “Kailash’s lifetime commitment to the cause of eradicating child labor is an inspiration to every human rights defender around the world to promote the rights of the most vulnerable, the most economically exploited young workers and the paramount importance of finding ways to secure basic education for all children around the world.”
Satyarthi’s decades of work to end exploitive child labor have encompassed advocacy for decent work and working conditions for adults, including domestic workers, because impoverished families must often make the difficult choice of sending their children to work for the sake of family survival.
“Child labor is a largely neglected, ignored, denied aspect of human rights,” Satyarthi told the Solidarity Center in a recent interview. “This is crime against humanity and is unacceptable in any civilized society.”
In 1998, Satyarthi created the Global March Against Child Labour, a coalition of unions and child rights organizations from around the world, to work toward elimination of child labor. Global March members and partners are now in more than 140 countries. Many of these civil society groups, including the Solidarity Center, came together to launch End Child Slavery Week November 20–26, with the focus this year on pushing the United Nations to make ending child labor a key priority of its 15-year action now under development.
Winning the Nobel “will help in giving bigger visibility to the cause of children who are most neglected and most deprived,” Satyarthi said upon learning he won the prestigious prize. “Everyone must acknowledge and see that child slavery still exists in the world in its ugliest face and form. And this is crime against humanity, this is intolerable, this is unacceptable. And this must go.” (Listen to his interview with the Nobel Prize team.)
At age 26, Satyarthi gave up a promising career as an electrical engineer and dedicated his life to helping the millions of children in India who are forced into slavery by powerful and corrupt business and land owners.
In 1994, Satyarthi spearheaded Rugmark (now known as GoodWeave), the official process certifying that carpets were not woven by children, and aimed at dissuading consumers from buying carpets made by child laborers through consumer awareness campaigns in Europe and the United States.
His life’s achievements encompass a range of human rights work. Satyarthi created a series of “model villages” free from child exploitation, and some 356 villages have emerged in 11 states of India since the model’s inception in 2001. The children of these villages attend school and participate in a wide range of governance meetings to discuss the running of their villages, through child governance bodies and youth groups.
“Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain,” said Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland said.
Satyarthi’s award of the Nobel Prize is the latest high-profile recognition of worker rights activists in the last month. Earlier this week, Alejandra Ancheita, founder and executive director of the Mexico City-based ProDESC (Project for Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights), won the prestigious international Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. And in September, Ai-jen Poo, founder and director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, became a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient.
Oct 7, 2014
Alejandra Ancheita, founder and executive director of the Mexico City-based ProDESC (Project for Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights), today won the prestigious international Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.
The award recognizes her courage and tireless search over the past 15 years for new ways to advance the rights of some of the most vulnerable workers in Mexico, including mine workers, migrant workers, child laborers and agricultural workers.
Ancheita, a Mexican lawyer and activist who leads the fight for the rights of vulnerable and excluded workers, migrants, communal landowners and indigenous communities, founded ProDESC in 2005. ProDESC is a long-time Solidarity Center ally whose work includes an ongoing campaign seeking justice for miners denied their right to organize for improved working conditions at the La Platosa mine in La Sierrita, Durango, Mexico.
“The award demonstrates that power can be held accountable and that worker activists, union leaders, students and others who literally risk their lives for justice do not fight unnoticed or alone,” says Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau. “We’re so excited that Alejandra has received this honor and humbled to stand with her and ProDESC in the struggle for worker and human rights throughout Mexico.”
The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights—known as the “Nobel” of human rights awards, is selected by the international human rights community and given to human rights defenders who have shown deep commitment and face great personal risk. Members of the organization include Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Watch a video about Ancheita.
Jun 2, 2014
Worker rights advocates have lots of tools available to them to help foster safe and healthy workplaces, family-supporting wages and social protections. One item in the toolbox is rule of law—and a recent Solidarity Center analysis of Mexican laws and policies through the lens of a key international standard offers an example of how to utilize legal instruments to make positive change.
The Solidarity Center examined Mexico’s Constitution, federal law, public policies and common law (court rulings) and compared them with the obligations the country agreed to in 1981 when it ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
Adopted by the United Nations in 1966 and in force since 1976, the ICESCR is a binding document signed by nearly all (162) countries. The IESCR covers issues such as forced labor, child labor, gender, migration and obligations to combat and reduce unemployment. It also includes extensive rights around freedom of association and the right to strike. The Solidarity Center compared three ICESCR articles with Mexico’s laws and conducted interviews and research to determine the extent of the country’s compliance. (The report will be out this summer—watch the Solidarity Center website for its release.)
Among the findings:
• Mexico’s 2012 labor law reform, in line with its ICESCR obligation to put in place a national employment plan and reduce the number of workers forced to make a living in the informal economy, has not fulfilled its goal of increasing jobs in the formal economy nor reducing informal-sector employment and overall employment.
• Laws in Mexico do not effectively limit the hours domestic workers can legally labor as part of its ICESCR obligation to protect the country’s 2.3 million domestic workers. Rather, the laws establish the possibility of a 12-hour day with no right to overtime pay, a violation of the country’s international obligations.
• Mexico’s labor law includes provisions to improve job safety and health, in accordance with the ICESCR, but many problems remain. For instance, new mining regulations cover coal but not other forms of mining, and attempt to regulate, but do not outlaw, artisanal mining, where many fatalities occur. The Labor Ministry, with one of the smallest shares of the federal budget, has limited resources for workplace inspections and even for the proper training of inspectors.
Such an analysis provides a concrete springboard from which unions and other worker advocates can pursue worker rights. Countries that ratify the ICESCR are obliged to report on the extent of their compliance, which includes enforcement, not merely implementation, of their ICESCR obligations. As a binding document, the ICESCR provides worker advocates a legal tool for pursuing fundamental socioeconomic rights based in international human rights norms.
Last year, the ICESCR Optional Protocol went into effect, giving individuals in countries that ratify the protocol the ability to seek justice for violations of their economic, social and cultural rights. Fourteen countries have ratified the optional protocol, including El Salvador, Gabon, Mongolia and Uruguay. The Optional Protocol can provide a key mechanism for improving worker rights, and unions and other civil society groups are well placed to advocate for its passage.
As part of the UN’s Bill of Human Rights, the ICESCR points to economic rights as essential to the fulfillment of human potential. As former South African President Nelson Mandela stated: “There is at times a tendency to view civil liberties as distinct from socioeconomic rights….There can be no more forceful refutation of that false distinction than the manner in which President Roosevelt formulated the generic freedoms of democracy
Apr 24, 2014
Alejandra Ancheita, founder and executive director of the Mexico City-based ProDESC (Project for Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights), is one of three finalists for the prestigious international Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.
Ancheita, a Mexican lawyer and activist who leads the fight for the rights of vulnerable and excluded workers, migrants, communal landowners and indigenous communities, founded ProDESC in 2005. ProDESC is a long-time Solidarity Center ally whose work includes an ongoing campaign seeking justice for miners denied their right to organize for improved working conditions at the La Platosa mine in La Sierrita, Durango, Mexico.
“Alejandra is an unsung hero. She stands up in the face of widespread violence and impunity in Mexico—often risking her life so that Mexican workers can have justice,” said Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau. “Alejandra’s difficult and important work shines a spotlight on abuse and exploitation that generally goes unnoticed. We hope this honor helps diminish the risks she and her colleagues face every day.”
The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights is selected by the international human rights community and given to human rights defenders who have shown deep commitment and face great personal risk. Members of the organization include Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Watch a video about Ancheita.
Jan 3, 2014
Alejandra Ancheita, a Mexican human rights lawyer, is featured on Moral Courage TV.
Alejandra Ancheita, a Mexican human rights lawyer, bravely fights for social justice and human rights in her country–following in the footsteps of her activist father, who died under questionable circumstances on her eighth birthday.
She founded ProDESC, an organization that fights for economic, social and cultural rights and which is a Solidarity Center partner.
Ancheita regularly receives death and other threats for her support for vulnerable people in her country including as a direct result of her work to support workers and community members trying to win justice from a Canadian mine company in the state of Durango.
Her story is featured on Moral Courage TV.
Story in Spanish here.
