(Français, Espanol)

On December 10th, 2014, International Day of Human Rights, the jury of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal released its ruling for the hearing on Canadian mining in Latin America.

Following two days of testimony in Montreal this past May, the PPT jury determined that five Canadian mining companies and the Government of Canada were responsible for multiple cases of human rights violations. These include labour rights violations, denial of indigenous self-determination rights, environmental destruction, targeted assassinations and criminalization of dissent, among others.

• Read the executive summary
• Read the complete verdict

Full press release below.

By Pablo Solon, co-authored with Josie Riffaud and Tony Clarke

On Sunday, hundreds of thousands gathered in New York for one of the biggest marches against climate change. The occasion is the Climate Summit convened by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the theme of which is "take action." But does that action actually include measures that could do further harm to the planet?

(Français ci-bas, el espanol abajo)

When we, as human beings, get a fever, we immediately get worried and take action. After all, we know that if our body temperature rises to 1.5ºC, let alone 2ºC [3.6 ºF] above the normal average, there can be severe damage, while an increase of 4-6ºC [7.2-10.8 ºF] or more can cause a comatose situation and even death.

(Tony Clarke, president and founder of the Polaris Institute, is a signatory of this letter and the 2005 laureate of the Right Livelihood Award for his longstanding work on trade justice and the right to water.)

Stockholm/New Delhi, July 25 2014: As recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, popularly known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize“, we strongly condemn the killing of hundreds of children and innocent civilians in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces, the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Hamas against Israeli civilians, and we mourn the continued suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants.

By Richard Girard

On April 24, 2013, an eight-storey building known as Rana Plaza collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 garment workers and injuring thousands of others. The victims, mostly women, worked in factories owned by a number of companies (New Wave Bottoms, Phantom, Ether Tex) that make clothing for high-profile retailers, including Walmart, Loblaw, Benetton, Bonmarché, the Children's Place, El Corte Inglés, Mango, Matalan and Primark. In response to the collapse, survivors and outraged Bangladeshis, and global civil society and labour groups, among many others, demanded justice for the killed garment workers.