On Monday, November 11 the 19th “Conference of Parties” of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-19) began in Warsaw, Poland. Negotiators are working toward a draft agreement with mandatory emission targets scheduled to be signed in Paris during COP-21 in 2015.
Last week the Workers Rights Consortium issued a report on garment factories in Haiti that sew for major U.S. brands. The report found:
…garment factory owners in Haiti routinely, and illegally, cheat workers of substantial portions of their pay, depriving them of any chance to free their families from lives of grueling poverty and frequent hunger.
The Worker Rights Consortium has released a new report that shows Haitian garment factory workers are routinely denied the minimum wage guaranteed by law: Scott Nova, the consortium’s executive director, said in an interview:
This week a lawsuit on behalf of victims of the reintroduction of cholera to Haiti was filed in New York against the United Nations. The source of the infections has been traced to Nepalese peacekeepers whose camp sanitation facilities were inadequate. The camp bordered a tributary of the Arbonite river, Haiti's largest, and waste from infected peacekeepers spread the disease downstream.
Activists of Kouraj a group working for the rights of the Haitian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, have been receiving threats related to their work. The threats seem to be related to a march against “homosexuality in Haiti”, scheduled for 26 July.
