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Every person on this planet shares a common humanity.  We all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent work, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Our governments’ have deflected progressive calls to protect the planet and protect its people. We all need urgent and people centred collective and national responses for our common futures.  

We expect urgent and people centred collective and national responses for framing our futures.

Today, we call on our Governments to work with citizens, including poor, excluded and marginalised people – including migrant and refugee peoples – to develop and implement policies that will lead to a just, equal, inclusive and sustainable Asia and Europe, and more accountable and democratic institutions – based on respect for gender equality, our environment and fundamental human rights.

To do this, as citizens, organisations and movements endorsing the People’s Charter, we call upon Parliamentarians and Governments to develop legislation and mobilise the resources for the following: 

Universal, comprehensive and legislated social protection 

This includes:- 

1. Free, publicly financed and managed health care enabling Health Care for All
2. Enable access to vaccinations, free of cost, for all
3. Free universal, public, quality education for all
4. Decent shelter for all, including decent, energy efficient public housing, with access to affordable sanitation, power and running water. 
5. Decent work and livelihoods – Decent work respecting the ILO’s Core Labour Standards, with living – above minimum- wages for all workers and carers in cities and rural areas.
6. Universal, guaranteed Basic Income for people who are ill, are unemployed, People with Disabilities and a living, decent pension for all.
7. Promote equality for all, regardless of class, ethnicity, nationality, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation, gender (including gender identity and expression) and age in fulfilment of international human rights law.
8. Initiate comprehensive programmes to end gender-based violence. There must be an end of violence to women in homes and workplaces, on the streets and in the fields.
9. Ratify the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and its Additional Protocol (1967) and the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and members of their Families (1990) and immediately enact appropriate domestic legislation and internal policies to ensure legal protection for refugees and migrants.
10. All countries should adopt legal provisions for immigration, for granting asylum and for protecting stateless people. The prime framework of reference should be human rights.

Climate Justice and Just Transitions

A just transition means a transition from the corporate extraction of resources and the exploitation of people, to the restoration and regeneration of our earth and climate and people’s rights and dignity. Promoting and defending democracy is core to our just transitions.

Climate Justice

1. Stop the expansion of fossil fuel energy production and consumption.
2. End government subsidies and public handouts to ‘dirty energy’ and related companies and divest from fossil fuel corporations.
3. Redirect and mobilise public finance to ensure people’s universal access to energy and make the complete shift to public and community/decentralised renewable and clean energy systems as soon as possible.
4. Keep fossil fuels in the ground and support the transition needs of societies in their path towards increased use of energies that are renewable, clean, accessible, sustainable, and, more importantly democratically, owned.
5. Have concrete short-term and medium-term plans for appropriate emissions reduction to ensure the possibility that the 1.5°C limit will still be possible so potentially preventing climate catastrophe. Financial resources and technology assistance to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation needs must be extended, also for the loss and damage suffered from climate-induced disasters.

Take forward appropriate legislation to enable the following as a matter of urgency: 

1. Commit to 100% renewable energy for all, to be achieved not later than 2030 for developed countries and as early as possible before 2050 for developing countries.
2. Pledge the finance necessary to build democratic, renewable energy systems for communities, ensure just transitions, provide universal access to energy, support demand-side reduction and energy saving measures.
3. Agree to an international moratorium on new coal projects to be implemented no later than January 2022.
4. Ban fracking and new gas projects and adopt a global moratorium on new fossil fuel exploration and extraction techniques starting in 2021 as a foundation for ending fossil fuels extraction as soon as possible.
5. Announce a phase out of public subsidies for fossil fuels to be completed by 2022 for all developed countries and the international institutions they fund, and by 2025 for all developing countries.

Global Green New Deal is an ambitious plan for how we can eliminate poverty and create millions of jobs while tackling the biggest threat of our time: climate change.  It involves massive public investment in clean energy, transport and climate adaptation work. It is about transforming all our societies to be safer and fairer, and enabling everyone to live a better life.

To rebuild and transform communities and countries through:-

1. Zero emissions economies;
2. Publicly owned, clean, sustainable energy;
3. Restructuring of all industries, manufacturing, agriculture, transport, construction and tourism;
4. Enabling the regeneration and development of bio diversity;
5. Promoting food sovereignty, sustainable organic agriculture and peasant agroecology;
6. Create common village level seed banks, to decrease dependency on commercial seeds, recognising the rights of peasants to freely use and exchange their own seeds;
7. Protect our Commons against privatisation; Recognise, respect and protect ancestral domains and territories of indigenous peoples, as well as their indigenous governance systems.

Fair, Just and Sustainable Financial systems

1. Deliver tax justice by stopping tax evasion and implementing a progressive tax system in which big corporations and wealthy individuals pay the highest taxes, wherever they live and operate. 
2. Ending illicit financial flows and tax havens.
3. Take serious steps to cut military expenditures and announce yearly reductions and transfers of resources to social justice expenditure.
4. Use public financing to directly invest in public services and low-carbon infrastructure.
5. The abolition of illegitimate and unsustainable debt held by governments.  Support the creation through the United Nations of a systematic, comprehensive and enforceable process for sovereign debt restructurings. 
6. Build robust democratic ownership of public financial institutions by ensuring that worker, user and community representatives are on supervisory or director boards, along with requirements for gender and diverse ethnic representation.
7. Ensure public scrutiny and democratic control over trade and investment negotiations.
8. Establish an (inter)national framework of binding rules and obligations to end corporate impunity and ensure (trans)national corporate actors and investors must respect human rights and promote sustainable development, including conservation of our planet’s biodiversity and the prevention of irreversible climate change. 
9. Establish constructive cooperation with initiatives at the UN to achieve an international legally binding instrument (UN Binding Treaty) on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with respect to human rights.
10. Permanently restrict the use of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in all its forms in respect of claims that the state considers to concern COVID-19 related measures and suspend all ISDS cases on any issue against any government. 

In the approved legislation and allocated resources, we believe that priority must be given to poor, excluded and marginalised people and that more participatory, inclusive, democratic and accountable institutions must be in place to assure that processes, policies and measures will lead to a just, equal, inclusive and sustainable Asia and Europe based on respect for gender equality and the promotion and protection of human, economic and social and cultural rights, and our environments – to enable the protection of our Commons.

Now we have a common need to build a just, equal, inclusive and sustainable Asia and Europe, and more accountable and democratic institutions – based on respect for gender equality, our environment and fundamental human rights.  

A People’s Charter is essential for our common futures – to take us all closer to a just, equitable, resilient, post-carbon, sustainable world.

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