In his official professional life, Cameron serves as CEO of the International Young Professionals Foundation (www.iypf.org) an international NGO he founded with four other Australian young professionals in October 2001. He will be working from 2005 to 2008 to build the IYPF in to a strong, vibrant and self sufficient NGO that informs, inspires and equips young professionals to be effective sustainability and social change agents. In addition, Cameron maintains an active interest in youth enterprise as a vehicle for liberation and social transformation. He is involved in the Youth Employment Summit.

Cameron is the Fairtrade Certification Analyst for Oceania, working for the newly established “Fairtrade Labelling Australia and New Zealand”, which is one of a family of initiatives around the world operating the “Fairtrade Certification and Labelling system”. Having worked previously as the Development Coordinator of the Fair Trade Association of Australia & New Zealand, the regional peak body and membership organisation for fair trade, Cameron played a key role in establishing the Fairtrade Certification & Labelling system here. Cameron is very passionate about the ability of fair trade to assist disadvantaged families and communities in developing countries to gain greater control over the lives, meet their survival and growth needs, and break out of cycles of poverty. In his fair trade role, Cameron is part of the “Centre for Governance of Knowledge and Development” located within the “Regulatory Institutions Network” at the Australian National University.

Through its programming last year, DreamNow helped to realize ideas which reached over fifty thousand people throughout Canada and the world.

Dev is a partner in a socially conscious fashion label, aujCollections, and is an avid explorer driven by a desire to share the story of dying cultures through mainstream media. Widely travelled yet new to exploration, Dev is currently preparing for his first expedition to Central Asia this fall.

Dev enjoys an active speaking career and has thus worked with several large organizations including the United Nations, The International Labor Organization and the Red Cross. Dev’s work has been featured through numerous media outlets including Time Magazine, The Globe and Mail and CBC Newsworld. He currently sits as an advisor to several start-ups and is a director of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition.

Dev holds an English Literature degree from the University of Western Ontario and currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Presented by Light & Life Academy

For most, photography is a hobby but some, passionate about this form of art, choose to make photography their quest for life. Twenty eight such youngsters enrolled and successfully completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Professional Photography at Light & Life Academy in July 2007. They come from different parts of the country - Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Chandigarh,… and from different backgrounds; graduates in humanities, commerce and science and fall in the age group 20 to 27. They have one thing in common - a very real talent for image making. This group exhibition showcases samples of the work of these talented youngsters. A beautiful blend of art and science, the exhibits cover a gamut of subjects - portraits, places, architecture, food, still life, industrial, automobiles …
The exhibition will include a presentation on photokina, the international fair held in Germany. With its new products, innovative ideas and pioneering technologies, photokina is the global business and communication platform for the imaging sector.
Light & Life Academy is a premier institute of photography in the country. Situated at Ooty, this institution offers both full-time courses as well as short duration workshops. Supported by the photography industry, it has been established to offer quality photography education to a wide cross-section of people.

Three million formerly stateless people across South Asia will receive citizenship rights thanks to decisions taken by the governments of Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said recently. It hailed the development as a victory for the rights of people without a nationality or citizenship of any country.

The government of Bangladesh recently announced its decision to confer citizenship on at least 160,000 of the country’s 300,000 Urdu-speaking population, also known as Biharis, who became stateless as a result of the partition of British India into two nations, India and Pakistan, in 1947. And the subsequent civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. An inter-ministerial meeting made its ruling on citizenship earlier in September. The decision has been referred to the law ministry for final approval.

Earlier this year, Nepal conducted an extraordinary operation which resulted in some 2.6 million people receiving certificates of citizenship. Hundreds of mobile teams fanned out across Nepal’s 75 districts, visiting even the remotest of mountain villages, to ensure that certificates were issued to as many of the country’s inhabitants as possible.

This followed an earlier campaign in Sri Lanka, where more than 190,000 people obtained Sri Lankan citizenship over a 10-day period, after a change in the law that benefited stateless descendants of tea plantation workers who had been brought to the island state from British India nearly two centuries earlier.

The decision is part of a succession of positive developments in recent months concerning several groups of stateless people across the world — following many years of stagnation, the UNHCR, which has a mandate for stateless people as well as for refugees, said in a statement.

Stateless people are people who, for a variety of reasons, do not have nationality or citizenship in the state where they live. The UNHCR believes that, in all, there may be as many as 15 million stateless people worldwide in at least 49 countries — a larger population than that of many established individual states.

Despite recent advances, millions of people remain without an official identity, living in the world of the stateless. In many cases they are unable to educate their children, benefit from government healthcare, get a legal job, travel abroad or do any of a wide range of things most citizens take for granted.

Globally, relatively few states have ratified the two UN conventions on statelessness — just 33 in the case of the 1961 convention and 62 in the case of the 1954 convention relating to the status of stateless persons. This compares to the 147 states that have now signed up to the 1951 Refugee Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol.

Source: www.unhcr.org, September 25, 2007
www.un.org/news, September 25, 2007

India has committed itself to the goal of abolishing human trafficking, which poses a grave threat to millions of its men, women and children, with the launch of the landmark Delhi Declaration that is expected to offer a tool for increased advocacy against human trafficking. The Declaration was born at the recently concluded First South Asian Regional Conference on Human Trafficking in New Delhi, organised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

UNODC, South Asia, in collaboration with the ministries of home affairs and women and child development, kicked off the initiative to generate greater awareness about the widespread evil of human trafficking in South Asia, which is second only to Southeast Asia in the magnitude of the problem.

The Declaration calls on all authorities dealing with the illegal activity, including the police, prosecutors and the judiciary, to undertake concerted action in law enforcement so that traffickers are punished quickly and severely.

The Declaration aims to carry out training and capacity-building of all stakeholders and strengthen legal processes wherever required, including protection of victims.

It also aims at reducing demand for prostitution, use of child labour and forced labour and strengthening the collaborative efforts of NGOs, local government and other institutions in order to prevent all forms of trafficking.

Speaking at the conference, India’s Minister for Women and Child Welfare Renuka Chowdhury expressed the hope that the Delhi Declaration would evolve into an effective campaign against human trafficking in South Asia. According to UN estimates, approximately 150,000 people are trafficked within South Asia every year.

Emphasising that a major area of concern is the early and safe repatriation of cross-border victims to prevent re-trafficking, Chowdhury said that her ministry, along with the Indian home ministry, was working on a joint plan of action and roadmap with its Bangladeshi counterparts for quick and safe repatriation of cross-border victims of trafficking from both countries.

Chowdhury also called for greater cooperation amongst SAARC countries to tackle the menace in the South Asia region.

Human trafficking has emerged as a booming illegal international trade, making an estimated $ 32 billion annually at the expense of millions of victims, many of them children who fall easy prey to sexual exploitation and forced labour.

According to Chowdhury, the sex industry in India involves more than 3 million people, including traffickers. Of these, 30% of victims are children.

Recent figures based on information from various ministries and agencies estimate that almost 90% of trafficking cases in India are “intra-country”; only 5-10% are related to cross-border trafficking, mainly from Bangladesh and Nepal. Despite that, figures from India’s home ministry reveal that only around 6,000 cases are registered every year under the Immoral Trafficking Protection Act.

“Under the ITPA Act, 7,075 people were convicted in the year 2005, compared to 6,341 persons convicted in 2004,” said an official source at the ministry. The home ministry, along with the women and child development ministry, is formulating a national action plan to address issues like urban trade and bonded labour, which have so far escaped the attention of the law. As part of these efforts, 8,000 police officers and 1,000 prosecutors have undergone training in the country, so far, to better deal with the issue of trafficking.

The low conviction rate of traffickers in India is cause for concern among international bodies including the United Nations which decided to frame the Delhi Declaration to commit India to the goal of fighting trafficking.

Source: The Asian Age, October 12, 2007
UNI, October 9, 2007

The rights group Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) has moved the Supreme Court of India to initiate a fresh probe into the Gujarat riots of 2002 and transfer the relevant trial proceedings outside Gujarat using the damning evidence of official collusion in the riots that was unearthed by a recent media sting operation . Activist Teesta Setalvad, secretary of the Mumbai-based CJP, also urged the court to ensure the safety of survivors and witnesses in pending riots cases.

In its application filed through counsel Aparna Bhat, on October 27, the group said the apex court should summon the original CDs, transcripts and all other material that may be available with the national news magazine and website Tehelka, in relation to ‘Operation Kalank’ carried out by the magazine and telecast on several television news channels on October 26. The contents of the story, ‘The Truth: Gujarat 2002’, were made public on October 25 to widespread outrage across India and beyond. The CJP also sought the passing of orders the court might deem fit and proper in regard to the facts and circumstances of the case.

The CJP said the interviews could be treated as secondary or supplementary evidence by investigating agencies in the concerned cases and hence there was an urgent need for the apex court to take up for hearing the petition filed by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which is pursuing a fair investigation into the post-Godhra riots.

The application was made to the apex court in view of the open manner in which several of those involved and accused in the communal riots admitted their role, Setalvad said. “We have also urged the court to call for the Tehelka tapes and examine them as evidence, apart from seeking expeditious hearing of the pending matters forthwith,” Setalvad added.

She said that in the past five years, the state had already harmed the trials to a large extent by repeated obfuscations, falsehoods and delays. Any further delay would render the trials impossible to prosecute.

Setalvad has already petitioned the apex court for a review and retrial of cases related to several incidents of massacre in Gujarat in the communal riots that followed a fire in the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station, on February 27, 2002. Fifty-nine Hindus were killed in the incident, following which Hindu mobs went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of over 2,000 people.

The CJP maintained that the sting operation revealed that there was a serious threat to the safety of witnesses in criminal trials pertaining to the riot cases. “In light of this report and the fact that the witnesses are still being threatened and there are allegations of complicity between the killers and not just the police and law-and-order machinery but sections of the judiciary, there remains a serious question mark on the security and safety of the victim survivors and witnesses.”

The CJP alleged that the brazen admission of and gloating by the accused, who were roaming free in Gujarat, over the rape and killing of innocent people put the lives of over 190 eyewitnesses and survivors in danger. The application urges the court to treat the issue with the immediacy of a life-threatening situation and “protect the lives of witnesses and the evidence which is likely to be destroyed by the state and its agencies”

Source: IANS, October 29, 2007
The Hindu, October 29, 2007
The Hindu, October 27, 2007

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