(Re)construction | Europe’s responsibility (M. Heywood, M. Saage-Maß, M. Rau & V. E. Thompson)
Channel: medico international
Date: 2021-04-06

Europe’s responsibility - What here is to be done

Discussants:
Mark Heywood (Health activist, Johannesburg): More than fair distribution of the vaccine
Miriam Saage-Maß (Advocate, ECCHR, Berlin): Global law instead of corporate responsibility
Milo Rau (theatre-maker, Gent): The Political needs a different language
Vanessa Eileen Thompson (Sociologist and activist, Frankfurt/Oder): Abolitionism as (re-)construction of world

Facilitator: Katja Maurer (medico international, Frankfurt)

Mark Heywood is a South African human rights activist focusing on the right to health. He served as secretary general of the Treatment Action Campaign, which advocates for free and open access to AIDS medicines, and until 2019 chaired SECTION 27, a nongovernmental organization that uses public relations campaigns and legal tools to fight for the right to health and education. Since then, he has served as co-editor of the new civil society section in South Africa's most widely read online newspaper, the Daily Maverick, Maverick Citizen. He also conducts research on activism and strategies for asserting socioeconomic rights and aligning economic policy with the realization of those rights.

Miriam Saage-Maaß is a lawyer and Deputy Legal Director of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), where she established and has headed the Business and Human Rights Unit for several years. Among other things, she has worked on cases against companies such as KiK on the exploitation of workers* in South Asia. She writes regularly on the issue of corporate legal responsibility for human rights violations in global supply chains and is an internationally recognized expert. In October 2016, Miriam Saage-Maaß and ECCHR Secretary General Wolfgang Kaleck were awarded the Hans Litten Prize of the Association of Democratic Lawyers (VDJ).

Milo Rau is a director, writer and, since 2018, artistic director of NTGent (Belgium). Critics call him the "most influential" (Die Zeit), the "most awarded" (Le Soir), the "most interesting" (De Standaard), the "most controversial" (La Repubblica), the "most scandalous" (New York Times) or "most ambitious" (The Guardian) artist of our time. Since 2002 he has published over 50 plays, films, books and actions. His theater productions have been shown at all major international festivals and toured in over 30 countries worldwide. His latest film, "The New Evangelium" (2020), will be shown digitally as part of the conference.

Vanessa Eileen Thompson is a research assistant at the Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology Department of European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). Her research and teaching interests include critical racism and migration studies, Black Studies, and intersectional inequality and gender studies. With a PhD in sociology, she is currently working on a research project on racial profiling and its gendered dimensions. Thompson combines academic and activist approaches to the analysis and critique of racist police violence and the resistance of those affected by it.

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The (Re)Construction of the World. Aid. Solidarity. Politics.

A conference not only on the miserable state of the world, but also and above all on the possibilities of its reconstruction into a place that will finally be worth inhabiting. In lectures and forums, the aim is to determine the relationship between aid, solidarity and politics from the promise we made to ourselves in the Declaration of Human Rights: The promise of a global and social order in which the rights granted to us all would be fully realized.

The online conference (February 12th until February 14th, 2021) was organized by medico international e. V. in cooperation with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Sozialforschung Frankfurt, International Institute of Political Murder and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

www.medico.de/en/reconstruction