The Global March launch will be combined with the launch of the annual Brotherhood Campaign, which this year is to focus on education. Don Paulo will speak about how child labour prevents children receiving education. He will then bless the marchers. I am sure people will react strongly to our message, that children need to be respected and live at an acceptable level of human decency. In Brazil, children work in agriculture, with silo fibre, on orange plantations, in cotton plantations and in shoe making.
Sexual abuse is on the increase in the whole region, often perpetrated by foreign nationals.
The Global March will cover four continents, Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe. The Asian stretch of the Global March has already journeyed through the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, and is currently in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, President Nelson Mandela has officially endorsed the March in Africa. All the marches will converge in Geneva on 1 June at the International Labour Organisation, with the aim to adopt and enforce international law to ban exploitative labour for children. The Global March is the world's biggest mass mobilisation demonstrating against the problem of child labour, which affects 250 million children worldwide.