By Ryan Schlief | January 12th, 2012 WITNESS partner LICADHO has been documenting with video forced evictions and land grabbing throughout Cambodia. LICADHO is also a part of WITNESS’ global campaign on forced evictions.
On 3 January more than 300 families were forcibly evicted from their homes in Phnom Penh by the local construction company building on the land and more than 100 state armed forces. LICADHO captured the forced eviction on video – see below – where residents have been arrested, women and children have been detained and several were injured. LICADHO and civil society organizations released public statements denouncing the forced eviction and demanding the release of those arrested and detained.
In 2009, in the same neighborhood, families affected by HIV/AIDS were forced from their homes even after considerable local and international community campaigning. A public letter to the Government of Cambodia demanding the residents’ right to health and adequate housing be respected was [...]
Continue reading New Year Brings Broken Promises in Cambodia
By Priscila Néri | December 14th, 2011 Roughly 170,000 people are either at risk, or have already been subjected to, forced evictions throughout the 12 Brazilian cities gearing up to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. The number – a new estimate by the national coalition of local groups monitoring the impact of these major sporting events – was released on December 10th (International Human Rights Day) in a new report on the human rights violations associated with these events in Brazil.
The report provides a powerful counterpoint to the official narrative often repeated by local authorities and decision-makers, many of whom like to say that “nobody is being removed by force” and that “no families are being resettled without proper compensation.”
If you follow our forced evictions campaign on this blog, you know that’s just not true.
The most powerful way to prove this, however, is to let those directly affected speak for themselves.
Watch [...]
Continue reading New Video the Government of Rio de Janeiro Doesn’t Want You to See
By Priscila Néri | December 2nd, 2011 A few weeks ago, I met our forced evictions campaign partners in Mexico and we traveled together to Temacapulín, a small community in the mountains of Jalisco state that has been fighting its own eviction for several years due to the construction of the El Zapotillo Dam.
We were reuniting after our first training in January, when we spent nine days together in a charming convent in Mexico City learning the basics of effective video advocacy and discussing how video could strengthen the participants’ campaigns against forced evictions.
This time around, we were excited to meet again and hear how our partners had been using video since January. Over two days we heard about how youth activists from the CECOP campaign screened a video to the state governor asking him to cancel the La Parota Dam project; we heard about how our partners in Oaxaca used video to influence the local media, mobilize the [...]
Continue reading Mexico Partners Use Video to Pressure Governor, Influence Media, Document Protests
By Priscila Néri | November 15th, 2011 Envelopes with letters and DVDs for the IOC- Photo courtesy of Vitor Peixoto
##Leia a carta-denúncia em português aqui e veja os vídeos aqui##
We’ve joined forces with our local partners in Rio and Amnesty International to call on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to address the complaints of hundreds of poor families that have been (or are at risk of being) forcibly evicted from their homes under the pretext of the XXXI Summer Olympic Games to be held in Rio in 2016.
On November 11th, our partners, after several attempts, hand-delivered a letter and video-dossier on recent forced evictions to members of the IOC’s Rio 2016 Coordination Commission, who were visiting Rio for a periodic project review. The letter – co-signed by Amnesty, WITNESS, Comitê Popular Rio da Copa e Olimpíadas, Conselho Popular do Rio de Janeiro, and Movimento Nacional de Luta pela Moradia – calls on the IOC to meet [...]
Continue reading Join the Call: No More Evictions for Rio 2016 Olympics
By Priscila Néri | October 20th, 2011 Sometimes, quite a bit. Did you know that in Beijing alone, over 1.25 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes to make way for Olympics-related development in the lead-up to the 2008 Games? Organizations like the Center on Housing Rights & Evictions have long documented some of the most egregious abuses, noting that the pattern of displacement has repeated itself in most of the cities that have hosted major global sporting events. Not surprisingly, poor communities and ethnic minorities often pay the heaviest price (see South Africa during the 2010 World Cup and India during the 2010 Commonwealth Games for more recent examples).
Here at WITNESS, we started working on this issue in Brazil last year, when activists were beginning to organize their strategies to resist the onslaught of evictions planned around 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. In the 12 cities chosen to host events across Brazil, thousands of families are [...]
Continue reading What do the World Cup and Olympics Have to do with Human Rights Violations?
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