Press Release

With feelings of pain, indignation and sadness, the organisations and individuals who make part of the International People's Health Movement in Latin America and the World are making an urgent call for the mobilization of support for the lives and integrity of the original ommunities and people from the south of Colombia in the Cauca Valley by denouncing, before the international community, the criminal acts committed by the Government of President Álvaro Uribe.

On May 13th/14th, 2008 Dr. Binayak Sen, an activist with a lifelong commitment to the issues of community health and human rights, will complete his first year of unjust imprisonment at the Raipur Central jail in Chhattisgarh. Organizations across the globe will be holding events on the evening of May 13th, 2008 to mark one year of his imprisonment. We appeal to your organization to hold rallies, candlelight vigils or lectures against his unconstitutional detention. Please let us know at freebsen@gmail.com if your organization would endorse this appeal.

The National Movement for the Right to Health joins with the indignation and protest of the population of Laurelty for the complete dysfunction and ineptitude with which the National Authorities have managed the situation since the outbreak of yellow fever was unleashed in our country.

As part of the ongoing Global Right to Health and Health Care Campaign, the campaign was launched in Benin on 1st March 2008 in Abomey Calavi.

"No police nor law can break the will of an entire resolved town to resist until all their forces are drained" (Gandhi)

The South African Chapter of the People's Health Movement (PHM) strongly supports the demand by public sector health workers (and workers in other public sectors) for a 12% wage increase. While we urge all parties to respect essential services, we also support industrial action if negotiations fail. In this regard we believe that the largest threat to essential services comes primarily not from the threat of industrial action but from the lack of official respect for, and the poor working conditions of, the workers that render them.