NT workshop to inform Indigenous communities about human rights

Help Indigenous people across the Pacific, more like soften them up likely, people and mobs all round the pacific having been talking to "government officials" for years and years, as if they have been listening. If the UN was sincere about Indigenous Rights in the pacific Region then DRIP (Declaration Rights Indigenous Peoples) would have been passed by its member states 21 years ago. Still no end to Australian Apartheid, Aboriginal Genocide here, no Treaty here, so where does this human rights discussion start?

I'd be preferring to be doing workshops with the Palm Island mob, and learning real lessons about Indigenous strength, direct action and fighting oppression. Thats the best way to arm Indigenous People to fight the onslaught of globalisation and transnational corporations...grassroots educating and organizing standing up and fighting back.

the workshops aim to help Indigenous people across the Asia-Pacific region deal with globalisation.

"[The aim is to] teach people what the content of international human rights standards are and how the international system works, how the UN works," he said.

"Then to develop their skills to be able to engage in those processes, to be able to talk to government officials - to negotiate effectively."

Human rights advocates from Asia and Australia are in the Northern Territory today to discuss how to improve Indigenous people's understanding of their basic rights.

The workshops have been organised as part of the Diplomacy Training Program and will be held in Batchelor, south of Darwin.

The program was set-up by East Timor's Prime Minister Jose Ramos Horta and is affiliated with the University of New South Wales.

Executive director of the program Patrick Earle says the workshops aim to help Indigenous people across the Asia-Pacific region deal with globalisation.

"[The aim is to] teach people what the content of international human rights standards are and how the international system works, how the UN works," he said.

"Then to develop their skills to be able to engage in those processes, to be able to talk to government officials - to negotiate effectively."

Mr Earle says representatives from Indigenous communities in Burma, Indonesia, Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries will be attending the week-long workshop.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1897173.htm

Change The Political Climate Turn up the Heat!

Kia ora tataou

I'll be doing a workshop at this years Melbourne Social Forum, hope to see and korero with you there.

The 3rd Melbourne Social Forum will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the 20th, 21st and 22nd of April 2007. This year's theme is "CHANGE THE POLITICAL CLIMATE: TURN UP THE HEAT!"

The mission of the Melbourne Social Forum is to create open public spaces to discuss, share and act on ideas for sustainable social and ecological justice. To do this the MSF hosts events, in public and on-line, which bring together progressive individuals and groups from within civil society in the Melbourne area and beyond. The Melbourne Social Forum is a dynamic open space for addressing the 21st century's most pressing local and global challenges: fair trade, labour rights, environmental sustainability, global peace and human rights issues.

http://melbournesocialforum.org/index.php




Whenua, Fenua, Enua, Vanua: Indigenous resistance to Globalization in the Pacific

Organisation: S.I.S.I.S (Settlers in Support of Indigenous Sovereignty)
Facilitator(s): Sina Ana Brown-Davis (Te Roroa, Te Uri o Hau, Fale Ula, Vava’u)
Description: "Australia and NZ remained unrepentant for their brutal suppression of indigenous independence movements in the Pacific. They rationalized such behaviour as enhancing the welfare of the Islands and the human development of their people – just as they justified similar behaviour towards indigenous peoples in their own countries."

The settler gubbaments of OZ & NZ are forcing a neo-liberal economic agenda on the nations of the Pacific, for 21 years the settler gubbaments of OZ, NZ, Canada, & the US have blocked (and will continue to block) the passage of the DRIP (Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples) though the UN. Things such as these and ancestral rights & treaties are meaningless in the face of economic and "security arrangements", which do nothing more than open up our region for the outflow of capital, (land, people, natural resources), evolutionary processes have run their course and the time for re- asserting a Nuclear free & independent Pacific has come.

http://melbournesocialforum.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=76