PBI-Canada attends advocacy planning meeting in Brussels with PBI projects and country groups

Ottawa-based Peace Brigades International-Canada coordinator Brent Patterson attended a PBI advocacy working group face-to-face meeting in Brussels, Belgium this past Monday July 18 to Friday July 22.

As our friends at PBI-UK tweeted:

The PBI projects present at this meeting were Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Indonesia and Kenya. The country groups were from the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Canada. There were also representatives from the PBI international office which is based in Brussels.

Among the key outcomes from this planning meeting, you will see this coming year:

1- more webinars featuring PBI accompanied front line defenders (including PBI entities collaborating on a webinar on the UN COP27 climate summit in November)

2- new ways for you to support these defenders using online advocacy tools (including urgent actions and petitions)

3- more research on the connections between Canadian companies, pension funds and other forms of financing and the human rights struggles that PBI accompanies (in order to better leverage changing the situations in which rights are violated)

4- support for PBI accompanied defenders to participate in mobilizations at annual shareholder meetings (hopefully including meetings in Toronto and Calgary)

5- increased use of social media as an advocacy tool to support the defenders that PBI accompanies.

We look forward to carrying out this work plan over the coming months.

Stay tuned!