Tag Archives: Injustice

World needs to spend another $100 trln on U.N. fight against global woes – report

By Simon Jessop

LONDON (Reuters) – Global goals tackling poverty, inequality, injustice and climate change face a $100 trillion funding shortfall and are likely to be missed unless 10% of global economic output is directed to the U.N. targets every year to 2030, a report on Friday said.

The U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals set targets on everything from the environment to health and equality and have the support of all member states, yet the supply of finance from governments, investors, banks and companies to help meet them has consistently fallen short.

Hampered by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the annual shortfall is now up to $10 trillion a year, the landmark report by the United Nations and the Force for Good Initiative, backed by the finance industry, shared with Reuters showed.

“Humanity is at a crossroads. More than ever, all stakeholders must partner to ensure this crisis is the beginning of a new economics for sustainable development with prosperity for all,” said Chantal Line Carpentier, Chief, UN Conference on Trade and Development in the New York Office of the Secretary-General.

Adding the costs of financing the global transition to a low-carbon economy to limit global warming, and total funding out to 2050 comes in at $200-$220 trillion, the report added.

The SDGs are a global “to-do” list addressing such issues as war, hunger, land degradation, gender equality and climate.

While more than 1.1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990, failure to accelerate efforts on the SDGs risked fueling conflict and crises, they said.

After a slow start, the world’s finance industry has begun to do more, with $9.5 trillion committed to 2030 and a record $2.1 trillion deployed in 2020. However there are imbalances in the way the money is being invested, the report said.

While climate change-related goals represented 20% of the funding gap, the theme was currently attracting 44% of the committed capital, the report said. By contrast, human, economic and social-related goals made up more than half of the funding gap but were taking in just 32% of current funding.

“The financial sector is playing a rapidly expanding role in financing the SDGs and the transition to a sustainable digital future,” said Ketan Patel, Chairman of Force for Good and CEO and Co-Founder of Greater Pacific Capital.

“However, with less than ten years to go, there is a pressing need to explore even bigger and more radical solutions than those being deployed today.”

Among other leading financial companies involved in the initiative include BlackRock, JPMorgan, Bridgewater Associates and Schroders, the report said.

(Reporting by Simon Jessop, Editing by William Maclean)

Afghan women denied justice over violence, United Nations says

Afghan women look down at part of the city from a hill top in the early morning hours in Kabul, Afghanistan July 30, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

KABUL (Reuters) – A law meant to protect Afghan women from violence is being undermined by authorities who routinely refer even serious criminal cases to traditional mediation councils that fail to protect victims, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

The Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law, passed in 2009, was a centerpiece of efforts to improve protection for Afghan women, who suffer widespread violence in one of the worst countries in the world to be born female.

But its effectiveness has been weakened by continued reliance on mediation by local elders to resolve violent crime.

“The wide use of mediation when a woman or girl has been beaten, mutilated or murdered, or when she has been the victim of that awful concept of ‘honor killing’, normalizes such violence and makes it much more likely to recur,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“To use mediation for such offences is at its core a human rights violation by the State,” Al Hussein said in a statement accompanying a United Nations report, entitled “Injustice and Impunity: Mediation of Criminal Offences against Women”.

In many remote parts of Afghanistan, where the formal legal system has no sway, mediation is the only form of justice, but the U.N. report focused on cases reported to the authorities.

No comment was immediately available from the office of Afghanistan’s attorney general.

Improving the situation of women in Afghanistan has been a priority for Western donors, who have pumped billions of dollars into the country.

But more than 17 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the report underlines the still-dire situation facing many women in Afghanistan, which ranks near the bottom of the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Inequality Index.

Tuesday’s report was based on 237 cases of violence against women and 280 cases of murder in 2016 and 2017, including murders within families sometimes called “honor killings”.

It found such crimes appeared to enjoy “de facto immunity”, fostered by a reliance on mediation, with just 18 percent of cases ending in conviction and a prison sentence.

“The resolution of such cases by mediation must never occur; and cases should be prosecuted under the applicable general murder articles in order to end impunity,” it said.

The report highlighted problems successive Afghan governments have had in building a functioning judicial system in a country that has traditionally relied heavily on religious leaders or elders to settle disputes.

It said many women faced pressure from family members and even some legal groups set up under the EVAW law to withdraw complaints or accept mediation. Victims’ rights were not a priority, and were even disregarded outright.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)