When in 2020 the Covid crisis reached Prague, the city provided housing for about 150 homeless people in humanitarian hostels, which proved to be a well working program. It helped the people involved stabilise their situation, and some of them even found permanent housing outside of the program. At the end of June 2022, the crisis shelter was coming to an end. The city council was planning on providing other housing solutions for some of the participants, but 60 of them would find themselves on the streets again, after two years of a safe place to come home to.

Jezevci, a small grassroots action group in Prague, joined by local social workers, organised a campaign and an action to prevent this from happening. Every day, they went to the Town Hall to count down the number of days in which the people concerned would be literally thrown out on the streets, they organised an evening and night demo on the square in front of the Town Hall, where people slept in tents to show the precarity of homeless people to the City Councillors and their story got covered by different media.

Climax and succes

The climax of their campaign was an occupation of the Town Hall. Around 25 people entered the Town Hall to spend the night on army couches, and they refused to leave before the Council would properly consider the possible solutions for the 60 people concerned, and not long after, the Council came up with a solution for the coming two years. None of the former homeless people participating in the current program will be left on the street any time soon!

Het Actiefonds is proud to have been able to provide materials for this verry succesful action. The Jezevci collectif will continue to organise direct actions for all kinds of topics, and surely living rights will be one of them.

More pictures on the Actiefonds socials.

The province of Caquetá in Colombia stuggles with armed conflict between the national army and various armed groups such as the FARC. As a result, life for LGBTQI+ individuals takes on a particularly tough character. According to a report by Caribe Afirmativo, these people experience threats, forced displacement, sexual violence, torture, forced labor, personal injury, femicide and manslaughter. Their lives are constantly rendered invisible by the conflict in the province, but that does not mean they do not exist.

The authorities themselves know this all too well. On June 28, for example, several people with a sex or gender orientation that falls outside the norm were sentenced to excessively high penalties in Florencia. Afterwards it turned out that these people were not even allowed to consult a lawyer, contrary Colombian law which states that everyone has the right to consult a lawyer.

That’s why the collective Mariposario Amazonico, in collaboration with the art collective Caldera Gráfica Crew which we also support, is currently organizing a series of actions to draw attention to the rights of LGBTQI+. For example, consider a march through the main streets of Florencia to which all people who recognize themselves as queer, LGBTQI or with different sexual orientations and gender identities and sex workers, the majority of whom are trans women, are invited. These streets are often the least safe for them, so they will use this moment to put up posters denouncing cases of discrimination in Caquetá. But also posters exposing transphobia in government agencies and lack of thorough sex education.

Mariposario Amazonico is already leading by example in terms of education: they are offering several workshops on lesbian erotica, physical and emotional care in non-monogamous relationships, and much more.

This group  want streets to be named after the victims of the Hanau attack, as demanded by the Intiative 19 February. Up until today, many streets in Berlin and other German cities are named after colonial criminals. It is exactly these streets they rename at night, making them public symbols of remembrance for the victims of Hanau and more generally, the many other victims of right-wing and racist violence. By doing so, they want to raise awareness around the failure of the security authorities to protect people of color, and confront the normalization of racism in German society. Their goal is justice for the victims, and an end to racism. By changing the public understanding of racism and holding authorities accountable, they hope to make it more difficult for racist extremists to commit their violent acts. 

By ‘saying there names’, this small group wants to make the demands of the February 19 Initivative visible in the Berlin cityscape, and Het Actiefonds is proud to help them combat racism and make sure the names of the victims will never be forgotten. 

More info here.

Even though a progressive Sexual Violence Eradication Bill against sexual violence has been proposed for almost ten years in Indonesia, it is still not ratified because of religious and conservative pressure on the government. The right fears that the inclusion of the term ‘sexual consent’ in a bill against sexual violence might tacitly approve of extramarital sex.

The lawmakers recently removed some essential elements regarding consent, power relations and public participation from the bill. Several progressive articles are deleted from that version, including articles that includes sexual slavery and sexual torture as a form of sexual violence. In addition, the definition of “rape” was refined to “forced sexual intercourse”, and the bill also transferred the responsibility for education regarding sexual violence to families, even though sexual violence is more often than not committed by family members! Ratifying this trimmed down version of the bill would be a huge setback for the Indonesian feminist movement.

Indonesian Socialist Youth Movement

This is why the Indonesian Socialist Youth Movement organized national demonstrations on Women’s Day to protest the dismantling of this legislation. They feared that a recent regulation to prevent sexual violence on university campuses, called The Minister’s Regulation No. 30/2021, might share the same fate of being trimmed down or cancelled.

The good news is that their campaign has lead to concrete results! They managed to mobilize mass actions in seven Indonesian cities. The combination between organizing works and linking recent issues of sexual violence cases in campus and public with the need for protest action proofed vital in the campaign. They even successfully defended The Minister’s Regulation No. 30/2021 on the Prevention and Handling of Sexual Violence at Higher Education Institutions!

Nevertheless, the struggle to pass the untrimmed Sexual Violence Eradication Bill continues. The bigots, fundamentalists, and conservatives such as Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) or Wealthy Justice Party lost the battle in rejecting The Sexual
Violence Eradication Bill and their attempt to criminalize LGBT. But the trimmed down version of the Sexual Violence Eradication bill is being passed.

Het Actiefonds supports the Indonesian Socialist Youth Movement’s Struggle!

There is a certain misbelief that ecology is a white middle-class struggle, organized and maintained by educated city elites. Insofar as lower class or racialized people are included, it is mostly in the form of benevolent but paternalistic policy decisions that should aid them without necessarily including them in the climate struggle.

This is obviously misleading, since those who are hit hardest by climate change know more than most how urgent the battle for climate justice is. The intersection between racism, poverty and climate change has often been demonstrated. Structural racism segregates racialized groups in dangerous locations with lots of health and climate hazards. The lives of these groups are deemed less worthy in the racist politics of the state than others, and thus racialized communities are often ignored in climate policies on a national or supranational lever in favor of an abstract CO2-emission reduction.

Roma Women of Vojvodina

Roma Women of Vojvodina will not stand idly by while their families are already suffering from climate catastrophe. The Vojvodina province is notorious for its poor water quality: 40 percent of its inhabitants drink water contaminated with toxic substances such as arsenic, the active ingredient in rat poison. This percentage might be higher in the Roma communities of Vojvodina, since they live in the poorer regions of the province.

The activists are determined to mobilize the Roma community to fight for climate justice: better drinking water. For them, climate change is already a human rights issue. The Roma activists aim to mobilize their community to protect their environment, organize direct actions against the biggest polluters and demand better living conditions in the present and the future.

Het Actiefonds is proud to support Roma Women of Vojvodina.

The Philippines have been in one of the longest lockdowns in the world. This has heavily impacted poorer households who were not able to gain money. The cash aid and unemployment benefits were only a droplet on a simmering plate. This is why the poverty rate keeps on climbing, according to the government from 21.1 percent in 2018 to 23.7 percent in the first half of 2021. This means that roughly 3 million Filipinos have become unable to pay basic living expenses these last through years, joining 23 million other Filipinos. Labor groups are calling the current minimum wage a ‘starvation wage’, and fear that the Marcos presidency will only worsen the situation.

As if that weren’t enough, the pandemic and the periodic lockdown worsened the poverty and exploitation of wage workers. With the botched pandemic response, workers are left to shoulder the costs of their own COVID-19 tests in order to work, which means that some are risking infection for themselves and infecting other people to avoid losing their jobs. Some employers would even take advantage of this opportunity to curtail unionizing and strikes, with the Labor Department denying workers of their right to strike.

Given these dire conditions, workers from 7 regions in the Philippines filed for a national minimum wage increase to Php 750 per day (€13.09). The current and highest minimum wage, which varies from region to region, lies at Php 537 day (€9.37). Because of their campaign, politicians have been urging Duterte to raise the minimum wage to Php 750 per dag before Marcos takes office.

Het Actiefonds was proud to support this campaign Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (Solidarity of Filipino Workers). A minimum wage should be a living wage!

At the other side of the courtroom, ADT and Justyna are not only faces by Ziobra, the prosecutor’s office politicized by the right-wing minister of justice, but also Ordo Iuris, an ultra-conservative Polish Catholic organisation and think tank, associated with groups such as “Tradicao, Familia e Propriedade” and the Kremlin oligarchs. The courtcase is higly politicized and examplary of the current abortion climate in Poland.

With their campaign, the ADT wants to stop the intimidation of Polish women by implying that their abortions will lead them to legal consequences. They want to standardize not only the right to abortion, but abortion itself. Together with the Centrum Praw Kobiet (a centrum for women’s rights) and the Balans Czerni publishing house, they organize a vast range of actions on different scales. From asking public figures to speak out for abortion, to organizing demonstations in court and at ambassies abroad, international networking, postering and flyering in the city, creating websites to spread information and a media campaign.

#JakJusyna and the Abortion Dream Team are supported by lots of international organizations, like the FIGO (international federation of gynecology & obstetrics), Amnesty International, the Abortion Network Amsterdam and Het Actiefonds.

Photo: BIRN/Claudiia Ciobanu.

In lots of different ways the collective takes up public space to motivate participation in voting for the second round of the presidential election. They organize neighborhood meetings and cultural events to inspire people to see themselves as political agents, to make clear that every vote against fascism counts. Het Actiefonds supports any combat against corruption and fascism, and helps Caldera Gráfica Crew to make people vote for change!

Picture: mural made by Caldera Gráfica Crew.

The Kween anti-corruption monitors are organizing to highlight a local case of embezzlement in the Sebei region in the east of Uganda. In 2018, the town council was allocated 90 million Ugandan Shilling (more than 20 thousand euros) to construct new offices for the town council, but so far no offices have been built.

However 20 million shilling have already been spent on vacation pay for councillors and technical officers to Kenya. As the anti-corruption activist Betty Cherop states: “each councillor was paid 800 thousand shilling to cross to Kenya to dance and drink yet they always hold council sessions under a tree.”

The Kween anti-corruption monitors is determined to hold these councillors accountable for the embezzlement of public funds. With support of Het Actiefonds, they have set up a campagne to bring this case in the spotlight of national media. With demonstrations, radio shows, national broadcasting and independent anti-corruption institutions, they aim to put pressure on officials to punish thieving politicians.

Het Actiefonds is proud to support their campaign! 👊

In a crystal clear case of disaster capitalism, after the typhoon Yolanda in 2013, and more recent one Rai in 2021, the local population is gradually being displaced by the government under the guise of their safety, while SIDECO, the company that owns 70% of the land of Sicogon is taking advantage of this ’empty’ land to build a resort, develop infrastructure such as an airport, and privatise common goods like water sources and beaches.

The Sicogon dwellers, most of them being farmers or fishermen, need these water sources and beaches to live their lives how they wish to live them, by being able to irrigate their crops and fish in front of the shores and bays that not only attract tourists but also fish. 

Half of the 30% of land not owned by SIDECO is destroyed by the typhoons, while the other half is protected forest, and cannot be used for agriculture. Since the government’s department of agricultural reform is easily corrupted by the tourist industry, the local Sicogon population finds itself deprived of land to live and work on. 

Now, the Federation of Sicogon Island Farmers and Fisherfolk Association (FESIFFA) and RIGHTS, a local nonprofit organisation pushing for the recognition of peoples’ rights and sovereignty, are fighting this land theft and forced displacement, by occupying SIDECO owned land. And they won’t leave before their demands are met. They are planting trees, appropriating the land, and invited professor Walden Bello,a Philippine scholar and social activist to join their occupation and discussions with the local and national government. 

Actiefonds is proud to support the Sicogon Island Farmers and Fisherfolk and their occupation!