As the power of corporations has grown, so should their responsibility towards human rights and our planet. Yet the reality is that around the world, harms to people’s rights through business activities continue to take place with impunity. In 2014 the UN Human Rights Council started a process to establish a treaty to regulate transnational corporations…

The food crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic has opened new ways towards sustainability and self-reliance through vegetable gardens in the less-privileged communities of Johannesburg. In February 2020, Seed Community’s Green Business College (GBC) in partnership with Tim Nectare Farms launched the Ubuntu Project (www.ubuntuproject. africa) aimed at providing fresh food boxes and setting up…

“Mining activities have huge impacts on the lives of the local communities and indigenous people in Brazil. I come from a country where mining has caused immeasurable disasters from colonial times to today”.  A Comboni Missionary talk about his involvement in mining advocacy. The largest open-pit iron mine operates in the land where I worked…

Big rivers emerge from small springs. They spring forth in remote hills. Big ideas to change the world are also born on the edge. Great movements to transform societies do not start from the centre: they start in small places and incubate in some unknown sections of society. Rosa Parks refused to give up her…

“A simple reception and some kind of accommodation” are “very different from a process of integration”. A personal experience. In about the year 2000, the U.K. government decided that it would send the largest number of its asylum seekers to Glasgow, an area that had never had new arrivals in large numbers except escapees from…

To Missionaries, living the Gospel in a radical fashion is a way of advocating for the poor and the earth. The devise, Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation is a distant horizon that, however, continually attracts and directs their fragile and sometimes contradictory steps. One of these steps is to invest in the agroecology promoted…

The UN Food Systems Summit was set out to review food systems to see if they ensure that the goal well defined by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, is achieved: “Build a world in which healthy and nutritious food is available and affordable for everyone, everywhere. But this should not be at the expense…

On August 23, 2021, at the Tacagua’ camp of Challapata, Oruro (Bolivia), thanks to the support of the CASA Collective, about 150 members of the communities that make up the National Network of Women in Defense of Mother Earth gathered. The concern was the threat of mining companies in their attempt to explore in order…

Advocacy is also defense when it acts to preserve the initial aims and values of modern discoveries. According to legend, when Vladimir Lenin was asked how he planned to “hang all the capitalists” in the face of a rope shortage in the young Soviet Union, he replied “don’t worry comrade; the capitalists will sell us…

Advocacy is both defending people, especially the poor and vulnerable ones, and actions promoting values. Splitting the two, people and values, however, brings advocacy to a cleft stick of becoming a tricky ideological issue. Insofar, a clear set of values on the background of any advocacy is of acute need. Two significant examples are on…

Advocacy is concerned with values, awareness and knowledge of problems to promote actions, policies and changes in the issues that interest people. Advocacy does not always aim, right from the start, at concrete results. Sometimes the right or desire of a person or a group involves too many values ​​and too many instances to offer…

Since April 2020, the European Commission has defined the EU strategy to support the fight against COVID-19 globally through an action plan called Team Europe, which combines and coordinates resources from the EU, its Member countries, the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and other EU financial institutions, in synergy with…