International NGOs' Address to
President Vladimir Putin
Moscow, July 4, 2006

We, the people responsible for making decisions at international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have signed this address to convey our individual and shared concerns to President Vladimir Putin and ask him to communicate these concerns to his partners as he takes the mantle of host of the 2006 summit of the Group of Eight on July 12 in St. Petersburg.

Climate change, energy and energy security

Climate change, a result of the excessive production and consumption of fossil fuels, is a major threat to mankind. Should there be no action on this within the next decade, the global climatic system will inevitably change. Energy strategies at all levels should be primarily motivated by an awareness of the Earth's limits.

The G8 should redefine energy security to cover climatic as well as energy issues, with an important emphasis on strategies for energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources. The G8 should also link the two types of security together to incorporate them into the day-to-day practice of international politics.

To provide energy and climatic security, the global energy system should be transformed now, which means that energy efficiency should be dramatically improved, and the whole system should move toward using diversified, decentralized, and mostly local renewable energy sources.

Apart from being a precondition of climatic security and stability, such a strategy would also ensure energy security, since it would make energy supplies more reliable. This is particularly important for the least developed economies, many of which still lack access to clean, dependable and affordable energy.

The growth and development of economies can and must cease to be linked to the growth of energy production. Instead, economies should focus on providing an efficient and fair supply of energy to all consumers. This turnaround, while critical in avoiding the worst consequences of global warming, would also help create millions of new jobs worldwide. It is, we believe, exactly the area where the Group of Eight should take the lead.

To do this, the G8 should begin by declaring its awareness of the need for action. It should also recognize that there is a need for practical steps to reduce our dependence on the global markets for fossil and nuclear energy, because such dependence brings about political tension, nuclear proliferation, debt, corruption, and air pollution that ultimately results in climate change.

We call upon the Group of Eight to:

• launch a global initiative going far beyond the Gleneagles Action Plan to encourage the massive introduction of renewable sources of energy and energy-saving technologies, and support this introduction with relevant regulatory reforms;
• commit to the enforcement of the 2-degrees-Celsius limit to global warming for this century, proposed by the European Union;
• commit to the reallocation of massive public investment in fossil and nuclear energy to renewable sources and energy-saving technologies, including those for vehicles;
• encourage the United States, the world's largest source of emissions, to set an example by taking steps to dramatically reduce its volume of emissions.

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G8 2006 action to eradicate poverty and provide sustainable development

Poverty

The world has the potential to eradicate poverty. Failure to act on poverty, inconsistent with the human rights commitments of many nations, would be ethically as well as politically unacceptable. Poverty, famine, and the deaths of thousands of children every day deaths that could be prevented result from imbalances in the distribution of income, assets, and such human rights as power distribution, access to information, and political involvement. These imbalances are particularly acute for women.

As a gathering of leading world powers, the Group of Eight should recognize that its members are individually and collectively responsible for strategies to eradicate poverty and provide sustainable development, an issue on which the G8's record is still very controversial. According to a recent independent study, the G8 nations have been noticeably long on words but short on action where poverty is concerned.

We call upon the G8 to act in the following areas:

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Aid

• The G8 should reaffirm its commitment to increasing annual aid by at least $50 billion per year by 2010 and commit to further increasing the percentage of official development aid to 0.7%. The G8 nations should also commit to the full payment of their respective shares of Millennium Development Goals expenditures.
• These increases should not include debt write-offs granted to Iraq, Nigeria or any other nation. The G8 should not state debt relief as part of aid and should change its aid procedures to put an end to such aid-overstating practices.
• The G8 nations should commit to achieving the aid effectiveness targets adopted in Paris, immediately lift the freeze on 100% of aid, and refocus aid to the least developed countries within the national accountability framework. This framework includes clearly timed and verifiable action programs that involve the local population.
• The G8 should support the incorporation of environmental protection issues into aid programs.

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Debt

• The G8 should extend the multilateral partial debt relief initiative to all the poorest countries without attaching any external conditions; they should, however, insist on transparent public finances.
• The G8 should take urgent action to cancel "unfounded" debt resulting from irresponsible past financial support for military regimes and undemocratic governments, where funds were often not used to eradicate poverty.
• Any debt relief program, for example, as part of an aid package or using returned assets, should include transparency criteria, such as the ability to monitor the use of local non-governmental organizations' and aid recipients' assets, as part of an underlying policy of promoting openness in public finances.

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Education and health

• The G8 nations should analyze progress on education as part of the Millennium Goals project confirming that they will provide their respective shares of funds for the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, and, especially, immediately allocate for this year the $420 million that has been delayed.
• The G8 nations should analyze progress towards the Gleneagles objective of providing access to HIV/AIDS treatment for all by 2010 and confirm that they willfully fund the sixth round of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.
• The G8 nations should confirm their support for providing free education and health care. They should also announce long-term, dependable allocations for creating quality public education and health care systems, including a commitment to create 2 million teaching and 4 million medical jobs in 2006 and provide funding to ensure the future of those jobs.

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Conditions and governance reforms in international financial institutions

• The G8 nations should analyze progress on the Gleneagles declaration that countries should be given the right to decide, plan, and set economic policy priorities within their own development strategies. They should also agree on further steps to abandon the practice of making donor, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund aid conditional upon countries' economic policies.
• The G8 nations should restructure the Bretton Woods Institutions to provide borrower nations with fair participation in discussions and decision making, with an important emphasis on the representation of governments from Africa and other underdeveloped nations.
• International financial institutions should also improve their performance in making information accessible, excluding corrupt companies, and looking for ways to avoid supporting corrupt regimes.

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Trade and economy

• The G8 nations should immediately honor their 2005 commitments to "considerably" reduce harmful subsidies to their agricultural industries, cancel all subsidies for agricultural exports, and provide products from the poorest countries with full access to their markets. They should also implement the Doha ministerial document on new trade rules banning fishing subsidies, which encourage greater yields and overproduction, while providing effective special and differentiated regimes for developing nations.
• The G8 nations should unconditionally reaffirm the Gleneagles declaration that countries will not be forced to open their markets.
• The G8 nations should give public reports on the progress of the Gleneagles "aid for trade" initiative, which states that aid should be financially meaningful, free of conditions, viewed as an additional measure to help shape the trade environment rather than a substitute for reform, and be defined and provided with due consideration for the national development strategy of the beneficiary country.
• The G8 nations should analyze progress towards the Millennium Goals of halving famine by 2015. They should also assess the steps the international community, including the G8, should take to counter the increase in famine and the decline in agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, including forceful action against dumping and non-selective liberalization of agriculture.
• The G8 nations should recognize that reviving and supporting small agricultural entities is the key to eradicating poverty and fostering sustainable development.
• The G8 nations should abandon the practice of imposing conditions on countries applying for World Trade Organization membership, including Russia, beyond those agreed upon multilaterally by the current members.

The G8 nations should make efforts to fight corruption at the national level, including criminal prosecution in accordance with the relevant conventions of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and cooperation in the restitution of misappropriated assets. Failure to do so is unacceptable, especially since developing nations expect others to meet high anti-corruption standards.

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Humanitarian security

Respecting and promoting human rights does nothing to weaken security; rather, it sets the stage for it.

Humanitarian security means the obligation of a government to protect its people from poverty, diseases, corruption, and abuse of their rights problems that impose fear in the daily lives of billions of people. It is therefore the G8's duty to use its political and financial authority to improve humanitarian security across the globe.

As international terror poses a growing threat to the peoples of the G8, we, the leaders of international NGOs, support efforts to identify, detain, and persecute those who deliberately kill innocent civilians in order to promote political agendas. At the same time, we are concerned that almost all G8 nations violate international human rights norms and humanitarian law in their "war on terror."

The U.S. government tortures terrorist suspects; keeps scores of individuals in clandestine prisons, refusing the International Committee of the Red Cross access to them; denies 9/11 suspects their basic legal rights; denies individuals detained in its "global war on terror" the protection of the Geneva Conventions; and hands over detainees to governments that practice torture.

European G8 members also try to restrict civil liberties; some of them have also been implicated in handing over detainees to countries where they run a high risk of torture.

We also question Russia's methods of fighting terror, especially in the North Caucasus. The clear security threat posed by armed groups based in Chechnya does not justify torture, mistreatment, arbitrary detentions, abductions, and extra-judiciary executions of individuals captured by federal forces in this armed conflict.

These policies and practices severely hinder the worldwide promotion of human rights, which ranks high on the list of priorities professed by many G8 nations.

Therefore, we, the decision-makers at international NGOs, call upon G8 leaders:

• to publicly acknowledge that human rights are inseparable from security, and that violations of international human rights norms and humanitarian law as part of the war on terror are unacceptable and then deliver on these declarations; and
• to make sure that their national counter-terrorism laws and practices conform to accepted international human rights standards and humanitarian law.

Measures taken by governments in the name of security that undermine democratic institutions, and in some cases threaten to put civil society under government control, are in fact a major threat to the people of the G8. This calls into question some of the latest amendments to Russian legislation on NGOs, which we think should be discussed separately.

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Source: Official website of the G8 presidency