‘Build a fair, rights-based, ecologically just world’

Islamabad:Thousands of people representing various civil society organisations (CSOs) signed in Kathmandu a civil society statement on thematic assembly on economic inequality and justice calling for action to build a fair, rights-based, equitable and ecologically just world.

The event took place on the closing day of 5-day World Social Forum in the Nepali capital, said a brief issued here Monday. The assembly was organised at the World Social Forum by Oxfam, Fight Inequality Alliance, Asia Feminist Coalition, ActionAid, LDC Watch, South Asia Alliance for poverty eradication and Asia Centre. The joint statement also signed by Dr Shafqat Munir, SDPI Executive Director, was issued by Mustafa Talpur, head of advocacy for Oxfam Asia.

The statement said that we need to lose our fear, for them to lose their power – is a challenge posed by us as we conclude the World Social Forum 2024. The power imbalance that fosters systematic and structural inequalities and the compounding crises that comes along with it, drives us to lose our fear to stand up and speak up against all forms of injustices. It must be understood as a systemic design that leads to gross violations of human rights for a vast majority of the global population. The statement further narrated that the wealth of billionaires built on the material exploitation of workers who struggle to access basic services, appears to have grown twice as much wealth as the rest of the world even during the time of a global health crisis, where most of the people struggled to make ends meet. This highlights that we need to redistribute power, put the people at the heart of just, equal and sustainable world we want.

The CSO statement said that at a time when survival and recovery become a privilege for most of us, the richest 1% have continued to remodel economic systems to shift as an inequality-generating machine and veer away from the democratic fabric of the world towards plutocracy. This must raise urgent and unequivocal global attention across the civic space that this is the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation we need to redesign another world that is possible.

We stand together across the world, as we share our immense rage, agitation and resistance against this unprecedented economic inequality further exacerbated by the Covid, war, cost-of-living crisis, and impact of climate change. In doing so, we condemn various facets of inequality— the caste, gender, and disability which intersect deeply with economic deprivation.