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	We must bend the curve towards Justice by Stacey Cram Namati   It was in a small kitchen in Transylvania when I first felt the sting of injustice. I was sixteen, sitting across the table from Eta, a retired doctor in her 80s whose twinkly eyes and cheeky laugh reminded me so much of my grandmother. We sat chatting and she told me how much she loved talking with young people and how she would have loved to have had children of her own, “sadly, not possible because of the sterilizations”. She noted the shocked look on my face and met it with a smile, a squeeze of my hand, and the push of a second slice of plum cake onto my plate.   Eta was a survivor of Auschwitz and I was there to document her story. She continued to tell me how “that so-called doctor” Joseph Mengele had chosen her for his sterilization program and ordered 10 members of her family to the gas chambers. I listened, growing angry at the now-familiar story of the few neighbors who turned against her, the many more who turned a blind eye, and at the system which made this injustice legal. She had no anger left but she was worried the world would forget her family’s story. I promised her I would not.   I have carried Eta with me since that day, but in the last 12 months she has been all the more present as every day I feel that sting of injustice. With politicians scapegoating complex issues on minority groups, increases in vigilante justice, the birth of “alternative facts” and too many silently watching these events unfold, it is hard not to make comparisons between today and Europe in the 1930s.   Injustice is not new, but rather than making progress towards solving the issues, we are seriously at risk of sliding backward. In 2011, the United Nations estimated that 4 billion people lived outside of the protection of the law. Around the world, millions of people were unable to secure citizenship, healthcare or an education, others had their land stolen or destroyed by corporations or man-made environmental issues. What united them was a routine denial of their rights and an inability to access legal support.   In the years since, the world made significant strides towards increasing justice, culminating with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015, which guaranteed “equal access to justice for all”. This was the first time that the global community acknowledged that justice was central for sustainable development and economic growth. Then 2016 happened.   With the refugee crisis growing in Europe we have seen many aid budgets reduced or reallocated to domestic refugees and vital new funding needed for justice has not materialized. With ‘America First’ policies we seem to have lost a strong and powerful ally for extending access to justice globally. In post-Brexit Britain, the government has recommitted to a 0.7% aid budget but it is unclear if the UK will prioritize fighting injustice abroad over negotiating new trade deals.   And with elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany this year, populist movements may gain even greater ground. 2017 looks set to be another difficult year.   Populist leaders often run on the promise of addressing injustice and reducing inequality, but we know this to be a false promise. Instead, populist leaders reduce civil liberties and empower a small, elitist class who pass laws that codify injustice.   A functioning democracy which serves the needs of the people requires accessible and effective justice systems at every level of society. No one leader can deliver justice; we need millions of activists, community paralegals, lawyers, civil servants and government officials offering a spread of legal remedies. Around the world today, these are the people protecting and empowering their neighbors to understand, use and shape the law to reduce corruption and reform systems. Justice needs these people as much as people need justice.   Justice needs Hassan a 78-year-old man from Tawarka Bay, a small island off the coast of Lagos, who in his retirement years has trained as a community paralegal to fight against eviction notices illegally issued to his community.   Justice needs Marita, a dedicated US civil servant safeguarding funds in legislation to ensure immigrants do not lose access to legal aid with the new administration. Justice needs Ken and Elizabeth, respectively first and last term politicians in Kenya and the US, neither one need make a fuss or fight for the poor and the marginalized, but they do. They listen to slum dwellers and water protectors instead of their party, corporations, or lobbyists.   Justice needs the nameless Polish lady who passed a piece of soap through a barbed wire fence to Eta with a note saying “we are here for you”.   Justice needs the millions of people who marched to stand up and say that what is happening today is not normal. Justice needs you.   It can feel overwhelming to know where to make an impact. But now is not the time to look away. The fight for justice has never been an easy one – “the arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve toward justice; we must bend it”.   We have a long road ahead but some key priorities I see are: we must build a vibrant global justice movement which brings together new activists with those already doing this work to learn from and support each other. We need legal providers to protect people when their rights are violated and fight back against discriminatory legislation.   We must support and recruit more individuals in office who will put conscience ahead of protocol or re-election. We need government, old allies, and new leaders, to prevent any slide backs on justice – the Dutch reaction to the global gag order is a wonderful example of a country taking a stance to protect women’s health. We need investment from governments, philanthropists, and the private sector to support this movement which is already chronically underfunded. We need to prioritize giving all individuals access to justice and fight together to make this a reality. Visit the related web page
	What living below the poverty line taught an investment banker and an MIT grad by Harsh Mander Scroll India   Two young men decided to live a month of their lives on the income of an average poor Indian.   Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment banker in the United States and Singapore. Matt migrated as a teenager to the United States with his parents, and studied in MIT.   At different points, both of them decided to return to India and joined the UID Project in Bangalore. They came to share a flat, and became close friends.   The idea suddenly struck them one day. They had returned to India in the vague hope that they could be of use to their country. But they knew the people of this land so little.   Tushar suggested one evening, “Let us try to understand an ‘average Indian’, by living on an ‘average income’.”   Matt was immediately captured by the idea. They began a journey which would change them forever.   To begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? They calculated that India’s Mean National Income was Rupees 4,500 a month, or Rs 150 a day. Globally, people spend about a third of their incomes on rent. Excluding rent, they decided to spend Rs 100 each a day. They realised that this did not make them poor, only average. Seventy per cent Indians live on less than this average.   The young men moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help, much to her bemusement.   Many things changed for them. They spent a large part of their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were expensive and therefore used sparingly; meat was out of bounds, as was processed food, like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil. Both are passionate cooks with healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a wonder food – affordable and high on proteins, and worked with many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were cheap: twenty-five paise for twenty-seven calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on biscuits. It was their treat each day.   Living on Rs 100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They found that they could not afford to travel more than five kilometres in a day, by bus. If they needed to go further, they could only walk.   They could afford electricity only five to six hours a day, therefore sparingly used lights and fans. They needed also to charge their mobiles and computers.   They used one Lifebuoy soap cut into two. They passed by shops gazing at things they could not buy. They could not afford the movies, and hoped they would not fall ill.   However, the bigger challenge remained. Could they live on Rs 32, the official poverty line?   The figure had become controversial after India’s Planning Commission informed the Supreme Court that this was the poverty line for cities. For villages, it was even lower, at Rs 26 per person per day.   They decided to go to Matt’s ancestral village Karucachal in Kerala, and live on Rs 26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and banana and drank black tea: a balanced diet was impossible on the Rs 18 a day which their briefly adopted “poverty” permitted.   They found themselves thinking of food the whole day. They walked long distances, and saved money even on soap to wash their clothes. They could not afford communication, by mobiles and internet. It would have been a disaster if they fell ill. For the two twenty-six-year-olds, the experience of “official poverty” was harrowing.   Yet when their experiment ended, they wrote to their friends:   “Wish we could tell you that we are happy to have our ‘normal’ lives back. Wish we could say that our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights ago was as satisfying as we had been hoping for throughout our experiment. It probably was one of the best meals we’ve ever had, packed with massive amounts of love from our hosts.   However, each bite was a sad reminder of the harsh reality that there are 400 million people in our country for whom such a meal will remain a dream for quite some time.   That we can move on to our comfortable life, but they remain in the battlefield of survival – a life of tough choices and tall constraints. A life where freedom means little and hunger is plenty..   “It disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now consider excesses. Do we really need that hair product or that branded cologne? Is dining out at expensive restaurants necessary for a happy weekend?   At a larger level, do we deserve all the riches we have around us? Is it just plain luck that we were born into circumstances that allowed us to build a life of comfort? What makes the other half any less deserving of many of these material possessions (which many of us consider essential) or, more importantly, tools for self-development (education) or self-preservation (healthcare)?   “We don’t know the answers to these questions. But we do know the feeling of guilt that is with us now. Guilt that is compounded by the love and generosity we got from people who live on the other side, despite their tough lives. We may have treated them as strangers all our lives, but they surely didn’t treat us that way…”   So what did these two friends learn from their brief encounter with poverty? That hunger can make you angry. That a food law which guarantees adequate nutrition to all is essential. That poverty does not allow you to realise even modest dreams. And above all – in Matt’s words – that empathy is essential for democracy.   * Excerpt from Invisible People: Stories of Courage and Hope, by Harsh Mander. 1 dollar (1 USD) is about 66 Indian rupees. Visit the related web page
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