African Unions Want Better G8 Accountability Over AIDS

The General Secretary of ITUC-AFRO, Kwasi Adu-Smankwah has echoed the call by the Global Union AIDS Programme (GUAP) for trade unions to deliver a message about HIV/AIDS to the Japanese Embassy of their country regarding the G8 meeting of the richest countries of the world next July in Japan.

Watch Human Rights on Summit
- Network of Lawyers observing Human Rights around G8 Summit -
Charter (Draft)

April 11, 2008

Yukihide Nakamura, Attorney at Law, Shizuoka
Yuichi Kaido, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Tadanori Onizuka, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Mitsuru Namba, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Kazuo Higuma, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Yukio Yamashita, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Koji Asaishi, Attorney at Law, Aomori
Kiyoshi Abe, Attorney at Law, Sendai
Morihiro Ichikawa, Attorney at Law, Sapporo
Takayuki Matsumoto, Attorney at Law, Kobe
Mikiko Ohtani, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Tadaaki Mutoh, Attorney at Law, Fukuoka
Shuichi Adachi, Attorney at Law, Hiroshima
Masato Wada, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Akio Taba, Attorney at Law, Tokyo
Yasushi Tadano, Attorney at Law, Tokyo

1. Situation around the G8 Summit

This year in July, the G8 Summit will be held at Lake Toya in Hokkaido.
Conferences related to the G8 will take place all over Japan in cities such as Tokyo, Niigata, Kobe, Yokohama, Aomori, Osaka and Kyoto.
Meanwhile, the police have intensified the surveillance of civil movements, e. g., by visiting offices of NGOs, who are planning actions during the summit, and by questioning the members about their activities.
Last year, a Korean citizen who visited Hachinohe in order to prepare the Peace and Green Boat which was co-organized by Japan and South Korea (600 participants expected) was denied to use the internet in an internet café.
We are afraid that in the months ahead, immigration control will be practiced more severely and members of NGOs from abroad who are planning any actions will be refused to enter Japan. Already, some incidents have occured which affirm these concerns: On March 7 of this year, a member of a Korean NGO who intended to visit Japan to participate at a conference was refused to enter Japan at the Narita Airport and was obliged to fly back to South Korea; it was only at her second attempt that she was allowed to enter. Also, a German who tried to enter Otaru Harbour from Russia with a cargo-passenger boat was refused at the border.
Recent media reports deal with the police being on high alert as an accomplished fact; critical discussions about such media attitude is – still – nonexistent.
In the last years, police authorities of different countries have been suppressing civil movements related to the G8 Summits partly with violence. Attracting the world’s attention as the host of the Summit, Japan might limit civil activities under the pretext of securing the Summit, regardless of whether the civil activities are related to the Summit or not. Therefore, there is a high risk of police controlling and surveilling excessively even the slightest radical civil activities during the Summit or related conferences.

28 April ICD will focus on G8 promises
Unions Target Japanese Embassies
Over G8 Promises for Health & AIDS

The Global Union AIDS Programme (GUAP) has kicked off a campaign asking unions and governments throughout the world to contact Japanese Embassies to convince the G8 Summit next July to strengthen health care systems and create a better accountability over its promises on HIV/AIDS.

Stop G8! Solidarity March in the South and the North

The Japanese government will host some Ministerial meetings before the G8 summit in Toyako in July. As a part of the meetings, the G8 Development Ministerial Meeting is planned in Tokyo on 5-6 April. Those kinds of Meetings had been held around the same time as the IMF and the World Bank's annual meetings before 2002. This shows that the Meeting has been strongly influenced by major powers and big businesses.

"Need your help to prevent the inhuman act!!"
Dr. Martin Kraemer, who is an agriculture Doctor and professional artist
from Germany, is sending out an SOS to public. He was refused to entry
Japan as a tourist on March 10th 2008 and was now restrained in Otaru
port, Hokkaido, Japan on the ship that he boarded from his last visiting
country Russian Federation. The Otaru port branch of Immigration Bureau
of Japan unjustly refused Dr. Kraemer to enter Japan. Moreover, the
chief officer of Otaru port branch is saying that they will transport
Dr. Kraemer back to Russia, instead of his home country Germany, by the
same ship on March 14th 2008. However, there is a fact that Dr. Kraemer
was unreasonably constrained by the political police of Russia before he
departed to Otaru. He was tortured and even was threatened his life
during the custody. Thus, it will put his life in danger again if
Immigration Bureau of Japan sends him back to Russia, where he almost
lost his life but managed to get out of it. This is definitely the
nonhumanitarian act and we need to prevent it. Here, we call for your
help to do two things:

1. Call on Japanese government not to take the inhuman action that
transporting Dr. Kraemer back to Russia.

2. Appeal to Germany Embassy in Japan to press Japanese government to
assure their citizen's safety so Immigration Bureau of Japan would not
send him back to Russia.
http://www.tokyo.diplo.de/Vertretung/tokyo/de/Kontakt,templateId=sendKon...

Here, we ask your help from the heart and it is time for us to get
together to prevent this nonhumanitarian act!!

THE ESPERANTO LEAGUE for FREEDOM in HOKKAIDO
naoto_5esperanto@ybb.ne.jp http://lea-h.sakura.ne.jp

●Press conference in Sapporo(March 10th 2008,Sapporo)

●Press conference of Social movements about Toyako G8 summit(March 7th 2008,Tokyo)

●THE INTERNATIONAL PREPARATORY MEETING about Toyako G8 summit(March 8th 2008,Tokyo)

●THE INTERNATIONAL PREPARATORY MEETING (March 9th 2008,Tokyo)

CALL TO ACTION AGAINST THE G8
Resisting Free Trade, Militarism and Fighting for Real Solutions to Climate Change

The G8 Summit will be held this year from July 7-9 in Toyako, Hokkaido, Japan. This will be a culmination of a series of ministerial preparation meeting beginning in March. The G8 Action Network, a network of various Japanese organizations and movements, is calling on all social movements, peasant organizations, women, migrants, urban and rural poor, fisherfolks
and civil society from all over the world who are resisting free trade in its many forms, war and militarism, the privatization of essential services and natural resources, illegitimate debt and the domination of global finance, and fighting for and building real people based solutions to global warming, to come and join us in the week of action against the G8 here in Japan.

WHY MOBILIZE AGAINST THE G8?

The G8 nations account for just fourteen percent of the world’s population and yet decisions made at these summits dictate the course of the rest of the world. And now more than ever, the evidence is stark that decisions that these nations have made have brought nothing but worsening poverty, increasing insecurity, deepening indebtedness, militarization and wars and now they are pushing for market based solutions to climate change which threaten to endanger the future of the planet. The host of the summit, the Government of Japan, says that it will make this summit a summit on the climate. This is rank hypocrisy. The reality is that the government, under pressure from Japanese industry, is backing away from mandatory limits to
greenhouse gas emissions.

We can no longer let this continue. The time is now for all of us around the world to come together and join forces to make our voices heard and stop the G8 from doing any further damage to the world.

JOIN US IN THE INTERNATIONAL PREPARATORY MEETING

We will also begin preparations to challenge the G8 Summit beginning March.
We invite all of you to come to Japan and join in our international preparatory meeting from March 7-11, 2008.

This is our schedule:
March 7, 16:00: Press conference at Parliamentarian building
March 8-9: International Coordination Meeting & G8 Seminar
March 9: evening, Move to Hokkaido by plane
March 10-11: Activities in Hokkaido

If your organization is planning to attend the meeting, please email
nag00562@nifty.ne.jp to register your participation. You can also contact this email for more information on the meeting.

WE NEED YOUR SOLIDARITY

As with all struggles, we can only be successful with the solidarity, support and involvement of movements and activists around the world in resisting this G8 Summit. We invite all of you who are with us in the struggle against trade liberalization, corporate globalization, war and militarism and false solutions to climate change and demanding for cancellation of all developing country debt to sign on to this call. We urge
all of you to join us in Japan and to strengthen our struggle and together, build another world.