International Peace Observers Network

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International Peace Observers Network (IPON) is an association founded in Berlin in 2006. The human rights organization that wants to take the peace process on the basis of active nonviolence is committed to the principles of nonviolence, independence, impartiality and non-interference. It only acts upon written request from groups or individuals.

Club work

The association sends voluntary observers to conflict areas as eyewitnesses. Through their personal commitment, they protect groups and individuals of human rights defenders who are threatened by politically motivated violence, kidnapping, criminalization, politically motivated stigmatization and murder by accompanying them. The feeling of subjective fear of persecution and threats is one of them. The concept of human rights monitoring developed by IPON is based on the Peace Brigades International concept of protective accompaniment: the local population and civil society make a direct contribution to violence prevention and contribute to civil conflict management in the long term . The goal of IPON is to protect human rights defenders in the project regions and only indirectly to reduce human rights violations in general.

The applied principle of observing human rights is based on a legalistic approach and the state monopoly on the use of force. Almost all states have signed the human rights treaty and are therefore obliged to promote, respect and implement it. If the state fails to meet these obligations, independent observers can testify to the human rights violations and bring them to the public. Foreign and Filipino actors such as B. Walden Bello ( AKBAYAN Congressman ) can use these documents and put pressure for human rights compliance. In this way, they should be perceived by the global public and also by the responsible state institutions in the conflict region as violations of an international treaty.

Current projects

The association is currently present in two conflict regions in the Philippines and supports groups of human rights defenders there, these are the islands:

  • Bondoc Peninsula (in Quezon province a good 250 km south of Manila; with an interruption since 2006)
  • Mindanao (the IPON office is in the province of Bukidnon; since mid-2011)
  • Negros (the IPON office is in the province of Negros Occidental; since summer 2008)

Also in the Philippines, IPON is carrying out a project on the political stigmatization of civil society groups who are accused of being members of the Communist Party and are therefore exposed to various types of politically motivated violence, known as red-baiting .

In the Federal Republic of Germany, IPON provides educational work for young people to become active and strategic public relations work. The strategic public relations work aims to win over people from public life, the administration and the media, to raise awareness of the human rights defenders accompanied by IPON and to exert political and public pressure on state actors for the threatened human rights defenders in the conflict regions. An English-language magazine Observer: A Journal on Threatened Human Rights Defenders in the Philippines reviews the conflict situations of human rights defenders.

The organization receives financial project funding from the Federal Foreign Office ( zivik program ). The observers are financed by two voluntary services : our own peace service program and the BMZ's state program “ weltwärts ”.

Previous projects

A group of peasant human rights defenders in the conflict region Quezon (Bondoc Peninsula), Philippines was accompanied between 2006 and 2010.

See also

Documentaries

Web links

literature

  • Action Alliance Human Rights - Philippines (Ed.): Human Rights in the Philippines - Claim and Reality. (Cologne: self-published, 2014)
  • International Peace Observers Network (Ed.): Defend Defenders - Demand Human Rights. (Hamburg: self-published, 2011)
  • Roman Herre: Germany's Official Development Assistance in Land Policies. In: Transnational Institute and 11.11.11 (2009)
  • Jan Pingel: With Presence Against Violence: Human Rights Monitoring in the Philippines. In: Southeast Asia, No. 2, pp. 80–81. (Cologne: self-published, 2011)
  • Sarah Potthoff: The Impact of Criminalization on Human Rights Defenders. In: EUnews (2009)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IPON and the Instrument of Human Rights Observation (PDF; 846 kB) In: peacebrigades.ch Observer vol. 1 no. 1 (2009), p. 15th
  2. ↑ Sarah Liedtke: Philippines: Preventing violence with human rights? Protect human rights activists in the Philippines with international accompaniment. In: Grassroots Revolution No. 336, February 2009
  3. ↑ Human rights monitoring in the Philippines
  4. ↑ First practical experiences in international peace work (PDF; 1.2 MB) In: Academy for Conflict Transformation in forumZFD: First practical experiences in international peace work (2009), p. 14th
  5. ↑ AKBAYAN press release of June 6, 2012 Congressman Walden Bello refers to the criminalization of human rights defenders documented by IPON
  6. ↑ Business Mirror from June 25, 2012  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.businessmirror.com.ph  
  7. ↑ [1]
  8. ↑ Violence against human rights defenders
  9. ↑ Monitoring of human rights begins in Negros
  10. ↑ Solution approaches against "Red-Baiting" Institute for Foreign Relations . (accessed on June 21, 2015)
  11. ↑ Activists under general suspicion
  12. ↑ Govt should stop 'red-baiting' of progressives, activists ( Memento of the original from July 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. interAksyon from October 22, 2012  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.interaksyon.com
  13. ↑ Human rights monitoring in the Philippines
  14. ^ Journal: Observer
  15. ↑ http://www.ifa.de/foerderung/zivik/aktuelle-projekte/ipon-philippinen.html Institute for Foreign Relations. (accessed on June 21, 2015)
  16. ↑ http://www.ausland.org/de/j/weltwaerts_in_philippinen/asien/4ee456/ Freiwilligendienstdatenbank von Sobia e. V. (accessed on June 21, 2015)
  17. ^ Regions: Bondoc