Latin America–Europe relations: Time for a new era http://www.tni.org/article/latin-america–europe-relations-time-new-era

In response to this Global Europe policy and EU 2020 strategy, social movements and people’s organizations from across all social sectors in Latin America and Europe are challenging this agenda by mounting an Alternative Peoples’ Summit, the Enlazando Alternativas 4, which takes place from May 14-17 in Madrid. (Read the call and check the programme) The People’s Alternative Summit will document the impacts of such extractive trade and investment policy and the systematic violations of human rights, labour rights and environmental standards by European Transnational corporations (TNCs) across the Latin American continent.

In a Session of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) witnesses from Indigenous Peoples, farmers, trade unions, women, health professionals and grassroots communities will give testimony on the complicity of the EU together with TNCs in applying such policy instruments as Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), Bi-lateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and Export Credit Agencies as an architecture of impunity which results in largescale impoverishment of people’s lives and the erosion of their basic rights.