NGO Documents for the Earth Summit, 1992

Non-Governmental Organization Alternative Treaties
at the '92 Global Forum

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Treaty 44. Treaty Against Racism

Preamble

1. This Treaty Against Racism was assembled by representatives of organisations present at the Global Forum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the year 1992, which represents five centuries of survival and resistance for the peoples of the Americas and Africa. These organisations fight for the emancipation and the elimination of discrimination against all oppressed peoples of the Americas, the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, Asia, Middle East, Australia and the African diaspora. This representation understands that racism is a form of ethnic, social and economic oppression which imposes racial supremacy and deculturalization on our peoples and that without Racial Justice there can be no world peace.

Commitments

Signatories to this Treaty Against Racism pledge to:

2. Recognize the inherent and equal value of all people.

3. Recognize the manipulative manner in which racism functions, negatively affecting and impacting upon all people.

4. Recognize and respect the special care-taking and protective role and knowledge that indigenous peoples possess in relation to those areas of the earth which they were given at Creation.

5. Recognize and respect the cultural, spiritual and healing practices based on traditional knowledge and unique relationships with land and total environments.

6. Recognize and respect the collective intellectual property rights to the wisdom of our traditional cultures, religions and ecological ways of life.

7. Initiate and support the right to struggle for, land rights for indigenous peoples, reparation and restoration for dispossessed and oppressed peoples and sovereignty and self-determination for all people. We encourage the use of affirmative action in making these goals realities.

8. Initiate and support sustainable development which empowers communities and is economically cooperative, humanly scaled, environmentally sound, culturally and spiritually sensitive.

9. Fight developmental racism, the imposition of eurocentric models of development that are not economically cooperative, humanly scaled, environmentally sound, culturally and spiritually sensitive.

10. Fight environmental racism, particularly the practice of disproportional dumping of hazardous and toxic waste on Third World nations and communities, and the imposition of this waste as a method of eliminating national debts.

11. Struggle for, and accept no less than, the establishment of a new technological and scientific ethic where biodiversity is considered the property of humankind so that it cannot be patented or monopolized by any corporation, scientific institution or individual of any country in the world.

12. Initiate action with the objective of stopping the use of under-developed countries and communities, specifically women and children, as guinea-pigs and laboratories for biological and biotechnological research.

13. Prevent the imposition of population control policies targeted at developing countries and communities.

14. Support the creation and implementation of an international network to provide educational, technological and economical assistance in eradicating the poverty and social misery of people.

15. Support cultural diversity while practicing and perpetuating our individual cultures and encourage the sharing and interaction of all cultures as a means of eliminating racism.

16. Eliminate all forms of genocide the killing of races; ethnocide the killing of cultures; and ecocide the killing of our environment, which are the perverse effects of racism.

17. We make these pledges while recognizing the seriousness of other forms of oppression and stand in solidarity with those oppressed on the basis of gender, class, age, sexual orientation and physical ability.

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