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	Human rights and accountability can help ensure the road to Rio+20 isn"t a dead end by Olivier De Schutter UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food   27 March, 2012   Why is sustainable development failing? Try asking those who feel the fallout. Two decades after the groundbreaking earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders will gather in June for the sequel: Rio+20. Establishing a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs), bringing together the interests of fragile communities and fragile environments, will be on the table.   Food insecurity is a symptom of both dire poverty and overstretched ecosystems, and will doubtless be central. But how will fresh targets succeed in stemming hunger where sustainable development efforts – not least the millennium development goals (MDGs) – have hitherto failed?   Along with 21 UN experts, I have called for Rio+20 to ground global commitments in human rights, and for a double accountability mechanism to be put in place to ensure countries are held responsible for their actions. Human rights and accountability are the hallmarks of the "best practices" we have, locally and globally, for achieving genuinely inclusive, pro-poor and environmentally sensitive outcomes.   Take the example of a recent fight for fishing rights in South Africa. In 2007, a group of fishers challenged a domestic fishing law on human rights grounds, and won. These communities had lost access to the sea due to a law favouring large-scale fisheries. The court not only found violations of the right to food – a right embedded in the post-apartheid constitution – and provided remedies to the fishing communities, but also required that the government create a community-led taskforce to rewrite the law.   So what lessons can the South African example teach Rio+20? First, the need to consult and involve the communities whose livelihoods are most threatened by degraded environments and narrowing economic opportunities. The targets set, and the policies designed to implement them, must be built around this participatory and inclusive approach.   The UN"s committee on world food security (CFS), set up in the wake of the 2007-08 food price spikes, is the best working example we have of participatory policymaking at a global level. The Rome body allows peasant organisations and NGOs to negotiate land rules on a level footing with governments and global institutions. The guidelines that emerge are all the stronger for their sensitivity to the true nature of food insecurity and the human rights of the poorest. These considerations are hardwired into the CFS approach by its very negotiating structure.   The second lesson is that accountability is key. What are framed as development policies often end up doing very little to help the most marginalised communities, and sometimes end up harming them. Meanwhile, the effects of genuine development policies can easily be overridden by industrial and infrastructural projects, trade agreements, and other external factors that tip the balance against small-scale farmers and fishers.   It is therefore essential to be able to cry foul when missing policies, misguided policies, or the sum total of policies, work against sustainable development.   Since 2007, the Human Right"s Council"s universal periodic review has been used to subject each country"s human rights record to comprehensive peer-led scrutiny. A similar peer review mechanism could be used to hold countries to their Rio commitments. Governments should complement this with their own domestic accountability systems.   Like the rewritten South African fishing laws and the CFS, Rio+20 will find that consulting vulnerable actors, and providing them with follow-up mechanisms, is a fast-track route to effective and targeted policymaking, with true sustainable development outcomes.   We must learn from the mistakes of the MDGs, which kept human rights and accountability at arm"s length and subsequently drifted off course. The headline target to halve global poverty by 2015 might be met, but this could be a very hollow achievement if high food prices, conflicts over land access and insufficient rural development conspire to leave a stubbornly high number of people – now over 1 billion people mired in food poverty.   The new sustainability goals must be calibrated to remedy the global, regional and local socio-environmental trends that lead to identified deficiencies in people"s right to food, water, sanitation and development. And through rigorous accountability checks, we must effectively pursue the sustainable development prospects of each citizen.   • Olivier De Schutter co-authored an open letter from UN experts to governments negotiating the Rio+20 summit, see link below. Visit the related web page
	Arab spring leads to wave of Middle East state executions says Amnesty by AP, Amnesty & agencies   27 March 2012   Middle Eastern countries have stepped up their use of capital punishment, executing hundreds of people as rulers across the region seek to deter the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab countries.   Despite a significant reduction in the number of countries that used the death penalty worldwide last year, there was a rise in executions in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen, according to Amnesty International"s annual capital punishment survey, released on Tuesday.   China remained at the top of the list of the countries with the worst record of executions last year. Authorities in China maintained their policy of refusing to release precise figures on the death penalty in the country, which they consider a state secret.   Amnesty said it had stopped publishing figures on China, available from public sources, because they were likely to "grossly underestimate" the true number, but reported that the country had executed thousands of people, more than the rest of the world put together.   According to Amnesty, at least 676 judicial executions are known to have been carried out in 2011 globally, excluding China, up from 527 in 2010. More than half took place in Iran, which executed at least 360 people. But reports about the regime"s campaign of secret and mass hangings of prisoners have made it impossible for Amnesty to publish the true figures there too.   "Amnesty has also received credible reports that a large number of unacknowledged executions took place in Iran, executions that would almost double the number of "official" ones there," it said. In December, Amnesty warned of a "new wave of drug offence executions" in Iran, which it described as a "killing spree of staggering proportions" in an effort to contain drug-related crimes.   The escalating use of the death penalty in the Middle East is seen as a tactic by the authorities to spread fear among dissidents in order to prevent them from participating in pro-democracy movements.   On a more positive note, fewer countries are resorting to the death penalty – 20 in 2011, down from 31 a decade ago, Amnesty said. The United States has significantly reduced execution numbers, but still put 43 people to death last year.   Amnesty"s US director, Suzanne Nossel, said that significant progress has been made in the number of executions in America as well as the number of new death sentences handed out – 78 in 2011 down from an average of 280 a year in the 1980s. The popularity of the death penalty in the US had also declined to record lows, she said.   But Nossel said "We"ve reached a tipping point globally where the vast majority of countries that are regarded as standard bearers of human rights have rejected the death penalty, and that makes it much harder for the US to explain why it is sticking to the practice."   Amnesty warned that Iran has used the death penalty at least three times on minors, in violation of international laws. Those put to death globally were convicted of various charges ranging from murder to adultery and sodomy (in Iran), sorcery (in Saudi Arabia) and drug offences.   Despite the executions, Amnesty said progress had been made even in countries that still carry out executions. In the US, Illinois became the 16th state to abolish the death penalty. In China, the authorities dropped the death sentence for 13 crimes, and in Iran the government made amendments to the country"s penal code, although they did little to improve the situation there. In 2011, at least 1,923 people were given death sentences, taking the overall number of those on death row to 18,750.   "The vast majority of countries have moved away from using the death penalty," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty"s secretary general.   "Our message to the leaders of the isolated minority of countries that continue to execute is clear: you are out of step with the rest of the world on this issue and it is time you took steps to end this most cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment."   He added: "Even among the small group of countries that executed in 2011, we can see gradual progress. These are small steps but such incremental measures have been shown ultimately to lead to the end of the death penalty. It is not going to happen overnight but we are determined that we will see the day when the death penalty is consigned to history."   Mar 23, 2012   China says it will phase out prisoner organ transplants over next 5 years. (AP)   China claims it will abolish the transplanting of organs from executed prisoners within five years, a health official says.   Rights groups call transplants from condemned prisoners a form of abuse and allege that the government, which executes far more people than any other nation, pressures them to donate organs.   The official Xinhua News Agency said organ transplants from condemned prisoners will be abolished within five years.   China refuses to say how many prisoners it puts to death each year. Amnesty International estimates it is in the thousands, far more than the executions in all other countries combined. The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation estimates that China executed 5,000 people in 2009.
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