ANNEX
PARLIAMENTARY MEETING ON THE OCCASION OF
THE WORLD SUMMIT ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The role of Parliaments in ensuring implementation
and accountability
Johannesburg, 29 and 30 August 2002
Toward Sustainability: Implementing Agenda
21
Parliamentary Declaration on the occasion
of the
World Summit on Sustainable Development
Adopted by acclamation on the occasion of
the
Parliamentary Meeting organized jointly by
the
Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Parliament
of South Africa
(Johannesburg, 29-30 August 2002)
Preamble
While the rich twenty percent of the world's population
consume eighty percent of the world's resources at an unsustainable
rate, some three billion people must struggle to survive on less
than two dollars a day, without adequate access to education and
health care, food, water, sanitation and shelter, decent employment,
productive technologies, clean energy sources, and ultimately
a liveable environment.
Poverty must be acknowledged as a serious threat
to humanity. Not knowing where the next meal will come from, the
fact that one's children and their children will be condemned
to a life of abject poverty, starvation, illiteracy and ill health
is inhumane, unjust and unacceptable.
In spite of progress on many fronts, the ten-year
old Agenda 21 remains for the most part unfulfilled: oceans are
more polluted and fish stocks depleted; forests are being cut
faster than they can regenerate themselves; some agricultural
lands are over exploited; land degradation and desertification
continue unabated; natural disasters are occurring with greater
frequency and intensity; global warming and climate change threaten
to undermine livelihoods, political stability, and the quality
of life for entire populations. The cost, human and environmental,
of all this damage is incalculable and, increasingly, irreversible.
To correct the dangerous course on which the world
is now set, it is more than ever incumbent on us, the representatives
of the legislative branch of government, to work together toward
the common objective of sustainability - social, economic, and
environmental. Setting aside our individual differences, and in
the name of the people we represent, we declare our commitment
to the following principles and means of action.
Principles of Implementation
We renew our commitment to the Rio Declaration, and
particularly to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities
inscribed therein. We likewise commit ourselves anew to the war
on poverty, as declared at the Copenhagen Summit.
We reaffirm the need for governments, acting in partnership
with civil society and the productive sector, to promote sustainability
without abdicating their fundamental responsibilities to the disadvantaged
and most vulnerable both within domestic jurisdictions and globally.
We consider that investing in the environment and
in people is key to creating a more prosperous economy capable
of providing for the needs of everyone on the planet today and
in future generations.
We are committed to building a society based on the
fundamental principles of solidarity, equality, nondiscrimination
and tolerance, as well as respect for all human rights. We recognise
the primordial importance of education in this regard.
We recognize the necessity for all public policies
in the area of sustainable development to include implementation
targets and deadlines in order to force effective action and provide
for measurable results.
Priority Actions
Given the key role of financing in the implementation
of Agenda 21, we endorse the spirit of the Monterrey Consensus
of the United Nations as a starting point for mobilizing additional
resources for the developing world. With the aim of implementing
that consensus to promote sustainability, we will:
- Channel a greater portion of ODA into projects
that integrate the environmental, social, and economic dimensions
of development, including poverty eradication, and ensure that
export credit guarantees are limited to such projects;
- Promote initiatives aiming at eliminating the
debt of both poor and middle income countries, including through
debt for sustainable development swaps, in order to enable them
to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and as an additional
measure to increasing ODA;
- Regulate investments to protect nature and bio-diversity
so as to promote sustainable livelihoods in local communities
and vulnerable groups, including indigenous peoples;
- Move forward with the full implementation of
the Uruguay Round of Agreements to bring about a fairer trade
regime, consistent with the principles of the WTO Agreements,
facilitate further trade negotiations to enhance market access
for developing country exports, and ensure that respect of intellectual
property rights does not impede access to life-saving drugs.
Recognizing the evolution of civil society over the
last ten years, we stress the importance of partnerships between
government and civil society organizations, including private
business entities, as a way of further implementing sustainable
development in both developed and developing countries. To this
effect, we will:
- Enact the necessary guidelines and legal framework
to promote such partnerships and ensure transparency, fairness,
and accountability, as well as add value to national and local
capacities;
- Help strengthen innovative local and workplace
partnerships;
- Give our support to regional partnerships such
as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).
Noting the inter-relationship between human security
and sustainable development and the fact that human security as
a relative concept is perceived and experienced differently in
the North and the South, we will give our greatest priority to
the following human security issues in implementing the economic
and social aspects of Agenda 21:
- Realizing the Millennium Development Goals by
the required deadlines by, inter alia, giving due priority in
our budgets to education for children, ensuring equal access for
boys and girls, as well as life-long education, food security,
access to reproductive health services, people with disabilities,
safety nets for all people, and amenities such as safe water and
sanitation and cleaner energy sources;
- Taking strong preventive and curative measures,
based on UNAIDS guidelines and with a particular focus on young
people, women and people with disabilities, to counter the HIV/AIDS
pandemic, reduce its effect on human suffering and sustainable
development, and meet the global targets for the year 2015;
- Similarly, taking measures to counter the increase
in diseases such as malaria, TB and other epidemics that threaten
the survival of communities;
- Implementing measures conducive to peace at all
levels, including in the domestic sphere, and to the prevention
of conflict. Reducing the worldwide annual military expenditure
of $ 900 billion so as to release more resources for sustainable
development;
- Recognising cultural diversity and promoting
the rights of cultural, linguistic and religious communities;
- Promoting human security as a universal interdependent
concept that incorporates early prevention of conflicts and poverty
eradication, gender equality, empowerment and protection, and
which requires fair and equitable trade and a rights-based approach
to human needs;
- Ensuring a shift away from a national state-centred
security approach to one that places people at the centre of sustainable
development and, to this end, consider the enforcement of second
and third generation socio-economic rights on the same basis as
first generation political and civil rights.
As members of parliament, we consider it our foremost
duty to strengthen governance by reforming its institutions, including
parliaments and decision-making processes to meet the imperative
of sustainable development. We recognise the unique role of parliamentarians
in scrutinising, monitoring and holding national governments to
account in respect of the implementation of international agreements.
We will work to put into place:
- New regulatory and administrative foundations
to make the integrated approach of sustainable development permeate
every act of government;
- National strategies for sustainable development
that include a measure of decentralisation of public and private
institutions for appropriate local decisions to provide a coherent
policy framework and measurable targets;
- Requirements for thorough environmental and social
impact assessments based on sustainable development indicators
and procedures for land and coastal planning, as well as legal
frameworks to adjudicate environmental disputes;
- Systems that provide access to relevant information
to people and decision makers;
- Regulations to implement new and rigorous methods
of green accounting in both public and private sectors;
- Democratic institutions and processes that are
accountable, allow for consultation with and input from civil
society, abide by the rule of law and respect fundamental human
rights and human dignity.
Our Pledge
We, the members of parliament gathered in Johannesburg
on the occasion of the World Summit on Sustainable Development,
pledge our continued support for Agenda 21 as the blueprint for
parliamentarians working for a more prosperous, equitable, and
sustainable world, and to work towards ratification of multilateral
environmental agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol. We pledge
to formally review in our respective parliaments the Plan of Implementation
of the World Summit on Sustainable Development and to speedily
implement, through legislation, including budgetary measures,
the provisions of the Plan that come under our purview. We commit
ourselves further to working through our world organization, the
Inter-Parliamentary Union, for a more sustainable and equitable
world, and to bringing a parliamentary dimension to the United
Nations, the WTO, the Bretton Woods Institutions and all such
multilateral organizations engaged in implementing the outcome
of the Summit.
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