Enhance peoples' connectivity: Peoples' Saarc
The Peoples' Saarc delegates, a parallel process to the official Saarc aimed at presenting the South Asian civil societies' collective voices on pressing regional issues, have submitted a “Memorandum” to the 17th official Saarc Summit through the office of the president of the Maldives.
The memorandum is a common aspiration primed by the representatives of various civil society organisations in the region who have created Peoples' Saarc.
It reflects the harsh reality in connection with the status of security, peace, justice, human rights, development, environment, refugees, migration, gender, among others, in South Asia from the peoples' perspective.
The memorandum calls upon Saarc and the member states to seize the opportunity towards engaging themselves in serious dialogues for envisioning a region fit for over one fifth of the world's population, a majority of which is consistently denied of rights and deprived of basic standard of living.
While the agenda of economic and social development might have moved up as a priority item for the Saarc countries, South Asian states continue to veer towards their aspirations for superior military might which prompts them to scale up their military budget, diverting resources away from developmental goals.
They said: “At the outset, we do underline the need for the Saarc to expand its ambit to cover all areas of political, environmental, economic, and social and human rights, peace and justice spheres of the South Asian region. The Saarc must also strengthen its structures to deliver on the aspirations for growth and progress of the people of South Asia through enhancing connectivity of the common people, building mutual trust and easing visa regime that ensures (barrier) free mobility of people across the region.”
They added: “The potentials of the region should be harnessed through equitable share of natural resources between nations and within nations to eradicate poverty and reduce income gap by drastically dropping wasteful expenditure on militarisation and relocating resources for human and social development. We understand that the guarantee of informed and effective participation of indigenous people, minorities and marginalised section of the society in all spheres of life is cardinal to development, peace, justice, and regional harmony.”
The memorandum said: “We demand that the rights of migrant workers and their families as well as refugees should be protected by immediately ratifying relevant international instruments and creating appropriate regional mechanisms. Similarly, the long-cherished regional human rights mechanism should be established without further delay in conformity with the principles of universally accepted standards, norms and values in order to safeguard and promote human rights of people in the region.
We also urge the Saarc member states to consider creating an independent climate commission with a view to promote more effective mitigation and adaptation programs to curtail adversarial impacts of climate change. We would also like to see the establishment of a regional monitoring body with a mandate to assess the compliance of the member states in installing, safeguarding and institutionalising democratic governance based on the provisions of the proposed Saarc 'Democracy Charter'.”
It said: “Since women bear the brunt of all forms of inequality and rights violation, the Saarc must adopt every possible measure to ensure zero tolerance on violence against women and exhaust enabling environment to promote women's economic security and leadership in decision-making, peace-building, security and conflict transformation endeavors.
Finally, Saarc should encourage the member states to adopt competent and credible constitutional' legal and administrative framework to end all forms of discrimination, displacement, deprivation and the deeply rooted culture of impunity to secure a better future for the billions of inhabitants of the region.”
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