The Implementation of the Santiago Declaration through 2023

A year ago (from 29 November to 2 December 2022), the Conference ‘Our Future is Public’ (OFiP22) occurred. GI-ESCR was part of the leading group of organisations that coordinated this unprecedented gathering of movements and NGOs working for public services and against privatisation. The conference was attended by nearly one thousand delegates, in person and virtually, from 113 countries, representing 567 organisations from various sectors.

The conference was rooted in years of a growing global mobilisation of grassroots, national, local, cross-border, rural and urban organisations, and movements. Key previous milestones of the broader public services movement included the first global ‘Future is Public’ conference in Amsterdam in 2019; the Enough is Enough webinars in 2020 and 2021, at which international and regional human rights representatives considered the critical role that public services play in building more sustainable, inclusive, socially just, and resilient economies and societies; and the Global Manifesto on Public Services. Led by GI-ESCR and adopted in October 2021, the Global Manifesto has been signed by more than 225 organisations.

The result of OFiP22 was the adoption of the Santiago Declaration, which calls for universal access to quality, gender-transformative and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society. During 2023, following the commitments from the Declaration, GI-ESCR has worked transversally and in solidarity with other CSOs and movements to build collective analysis, develop joint activities, strengthen the frameworks on the important role of public services for the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights, and its financing through progressive taxation policies.

Following OFIP22, GI-ESCR actively worked towards advancing the agenda. Below, we present examples of the continuous collaborative impact of the Santiago Declaration.

Public services in Africa

GI-ESCR participated in "The Africa We Want: Reclaiming Public Services in Africa" conference organised by the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) in partnership with the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability (ACCA) from 29th to 30th August 2023. The event was an opportunity to shed light on General Comment No. 7 of the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR), which acknowledges African states' primary obligation to provide public services for their people and provides a framework to regulate private actors and hold them accountable.

OFiP-Kenya

As a follow-up of OFiP22, national and international non-governmental organisations, including GI-ESCR, came together to follow up on the right to quality public services in Kenya and to advocate against privatisation trends in the country.

Arts Competition in Kenya

GI-ESCR with the Centre for Human Rights & Peace of Nairobi University, agreed to organise an Arts Competition to motivate students to express their views, experiences, and perceptions on public services as a right and particularly on how they think public services contribute to building a just, inclusive, and equal society.

In this context, we organised an in-person community discussion with the participation of university panellists and partners like ActionAid International and OXFAM International to pursue the conversation around the theme of public services for building a just, inclusive, and equal society. Students actively participated by sharing their perspectives on the historical and contemporary significance of public services in addressing socio-economic inequalities within Kenya. They also seized the opportunity to propose recommendations on how public services can be harnessed to construct a more equitable, inclusive, and just Kenya, aligning with the overarching theme of the Arts Competition.

The winning artwork showcased how the State can mitigate health risks by providing clean and accessible water to the community, prioritising environmental care, and ensuring medical accessibility in informal settlements by illustrating an ambulance's access to an informal settlement, facilitating the transportation of a pregnant woman to the hospital.

Regional Education Learning Initiative Kenya

GI-ESCR participated in the 6th Annual Convening of the Regional Education Learning Initiative Kenya (RELI-Kenya), with the participation of members from Uganda and Tanzania, held from 30th August to 1^st September, that brought together approximately 20 member organisations, focusing on key themes such as Equity and Inclusion, Values and Life Skills, and Learner-Centred Teaching to ensure the right to quality education for all children in Kenya. The RELI network comprises more than 70 organisations that work to ensure inclusive learning for all children in East Africa.

Participatory Action Research on Health on Ivory Coast

Participatory methods are fundamental in empowering local communities while investigating human rights problems. They play an essential role in amplifying the voices and perspectives of individuals whose rights are affected. As part of this project, GI-ESCR joined forces with the Mouvement Ivorien des Droits Humain (MIDH) to conduct a participatory-action-research on access to healthcare services in Gagnoa, Ivory Coast.

This experience aims to empower local communities to share their understanding of the challenges they face in accessing healthcare services from a human rights perspective. At the same time, the community enriches the research by incorporating their invaluable experience of accessing healthcare services. The final action-oriented goal is to establish a grassroots, community-led committee responsible for monitoring and reporting right-to-health violations related to access to healthcare services, especially for marginalised populations, like women, disabled people and the chronically ill.

Economic Justice and the right to education

Within the Privatisation of Education and Human Rights Consortium (PEHRC), a task force on tax justice and education was set up, bringing together ActionAid, Tax Justice Network, TaxEd Alliance, Right to Education Initiative, Results UK, Education For All Sierra Leone and the University of Maryland. The task force aims to use tax justice to address the privatisation of education and includes the human rights lens to add value to the existing work on the topic. PEHRC is an informal network of organisations and individuals who collaborate to analyse and respond to the challenges posed by the rapid growth of private educational actors from a human rights perspective and propose alternatives.

Economic Justice and Public Services

GI-ESCR, with the support of The Geneva Human Rights Platform, brought together on 3-4 October 2023 human rights experts from 17 countries from Africa, Latin America, and Europe to discuss how to strengthen a human rights approach to social services and progressive taxation.

The meeting aimed to hold a South-South learning and sharing of experiences to ensure human rights monitoring bodies, in particular from the African and Inter-American Systems, continue to clarify States’ human rights obligations to provide quality public services financed by progressive taxation. 

With this meeting, GI-ESCR achieved holding a dialogue amongst human rights experts on how States can increase their domestic resources through progressive and fair fiscal policies– for the sustainable financing of social (public) services so that they become a reality. It also established the ground for possible common understandings and alliances between experts from the different regional systems and civil society.

Public Services Financed by Progressive Taxation

GI-ESCR has actively advocated for a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive global taxation. Together with the Initiative of Human Rights Principles in Fiscal Policy, we participated in a public hearing on human rights and fiscal policies before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on 6 March 2023, during its 186^th Sessions held in Los Angeles, California. In the hearing, we highlighted the need for a human rights-based approach to fiscal policies based on regional cooperation and progressivity standards to guarantee economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights in the Americas.

We have also organised and participated in a series of events in Paris (15 March), Bogota (2-5 May) and Santiago (15-17 May), which laid down the ground for the first Summit on Progressive Taxation in Latin America and the Caribbean that took place during July in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Additionally, we continued to strengthen and consolidate the Initiative of Principles of Human Rights in Fiscal Policy, for example, by actively joining the organisation of the Third Week for Tax Justice and Human Rights (3-7 July), a space for dialogue on tax cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean, the feminist tax agenda and sovereign debt.

Finally, on 27 and 28 July 2023, we participated and engaged with the Summit on Progressive Taxation in Latin America and the Caribbean, which represents a significant event on public services and tax justice that has rallied a cross-sectoral movement of people and organisations throughout Latin America to influence governments’ fiscal decisions and to make the voice of civil society heard. This was also the ground for collective statements and advocacy campaigns towards broader international tax cooperation that brought attention to the link between tax justice, human rights, and climate justice, as well as the negative impact on human rights of the global rules governing the current international financial and tax systems.

Fiscal justice, climate crisis and gender just transition

On 8 October, GI-ESCR and partners participated in the “Reclaim Our Future” Conference in Marrakech (Morocco). The event was organised by a range of social movements and civil society organisations, aiming to hold the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG) accountable for a broken and outdated global financial and fiscal architecture.

GI-ESCR and partners co-organised an interactive workshop called “A Global Financial System that Advances Human Rights? Towards a shared vision for a green and gender-just transition”. This event brought together a group of experts and activists to share their views on the principles that should guide the transformation of the international financial architecture. It detonated a debate on (i) how public finance need should be reimagined to achieve a gender-just transition towards a sustainable future (ii) how human rights principles and standards could reshape the global financial and tax system, (iii) collectively mapped out advocacy strategies based in green, feminist, and rights-aligned principles; and (iv) brainstormed effective strategies to achieve a gender-just transition that includes cross-movement organising.

Energy and environmental justice

On 5 September, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR), jointly with other 17 partner organisations, launched the Declaration on Energy Democracy. This results from the two-day Energy sector meeting as part of the Our Future is Public conference in Santiago, involving various organisations working towards sustainable, democratic and universal energy for all. This Declaration aims to strengthen, expand and unify the many social movements and networks committed to energy and environmental justice. This means a fundamental shift in the understanding, value, consumption, and management of energy, considered a human right, of public ownership, against colonialism, profiteering good living, reducing energy consumption and sufficiency for all.

As GI-ESCR continues to champion human rights principles, it looks forward to contributing to a transformative shift in the international financial architecture to ensure quality, gender-transformative and equitable public services for realising economic, social, cultural and environmental rights.