Public Hearing on The World Bank in Hague

The Hague, 21 October, 2007

DECLARATION

Upon request from the World Bank Campaign Europe, a Public Hearing was
convened on October 15 in the Hague, The Netherlands under the auspices
of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal to provide a forum to assess the
performance of the World Bank in the last 15 years.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) in continuity with the Russell
Tribunal supported by the Lelio Basso Foundation, has the stated goal of
giving public profile and a juridical qualification to violations of
fundamental rights that do not find a proper redress at the
institutional level. It bases its actions on the Universal Declaration
of Peoples’ Rights of Algiers, 1976.

The PPT held specific sessions in Berlin in 1988 and Madrid in 1994 to
assess World Bank and International Monetary Fund activities and roles
against their impact on peoples’ rights. Other sessions have also taken
place that are relevant to the specific area of work and analysis of the
later Hearing, addressing the challenges posed by the globalized economy
to peoples’ rights and self-determination.

The latest session held in Vienna in May 2006 within the Enlazando
Alternativas 2 process, dealt with the responsibilities of European
Transnational Companies (TNCs) in Latin America. It analysed cases of
the privatisation of public utilities and the extraction of natural
resources. It pointed out the “complicity of European governments that
support their TNCs“ and the role of international institutions such as
the World Bank, the WTO (the World Trade Organisation) and the
International Monetary Fund. The last of a series of hearings held by
the PPT Chapter in Colombia, focusing on the oil sector, acknowledged
the relevance of the concept of ecological debt when dealing with the
responsibilities of European TNCs.

At the end of September 2007, an Independent People’s Tribunal on the
World Bank took place in India. Finally, a few days before the The Hague
Hearing, another PPT session was held in Managua, Nicaragua, on the
Spanish Company Union Fenosa.

The later hearing in The Hague was an important opportunity to continue
developing new approaches to the current area of activity, by deepening
the analysis of the World Bank’s role in various countries of the Global
South.

Read the detail declaration and next steps, click here