QUNO Geneva's newsletter for November 2010 to January 2011. Featured stories:

• About the year-in-review issue
• From Policy-makers to Practitioners: Disarmament and Peace 2010
• From Seeds to Sustainability: Global Economic Issues 2010
• From Prisons to Protection :Human Rights and Refugees 2010
• Update from QUNO New York
• QUNO Summer School 2011
• Staff Update

PeaceBuilding from the Ground Up - preventing and reducing armed violence, Comunidad Segura Good Practices Magazine, Year II, Number 4.

Brings stories from East Africa as sources of inspiration and reflection on armed violence and development. It features good practices from the civil society participants in the 2009 seminar  “Creating a Community of Practice on Armed Violence and Development (AV&D) in East Africa” that took place in Nairobi in November 2010. This seminar gathered civil society practitioners directly involved in the design and implementation of AV&D work. The aim was to highlight evidence of good practice in AV&D programming.

Comunidad Segura “Good Practices” magazine aims to serve as a source of information on grassroots initiatives that can help to inform advocacy campaigns and national and international public policy and programming.

The world of agriculture policy has changed fundamentally since the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture was adopted. This is a report of a panel discussion held during the WTO Public Forum, September 2010, that aimed to present some of the challenges facing world agriculture today, and how these could be addressed.

In particular, the session focused on the need for agriculture to provide food for the world’s population in a sustainable way. Presenters raised some issues in the Doha Round, the potential for sustainable agriculture to feed the world, and the role that food reserves can play in ensuring food security.

These are written comments submitted by Friends World Committee for Consultation (Quakers) jointly with Amnesty International, Conscience and Peace Tax International, International Commission of Jurists and War Resisters’ International. They were submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Vahan Bayatyan (The Applicant) vs. ARMENIA (The Respondent Government). The submission argues that conscientious objection to military service is protected under the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Art. 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms).

In this oral statement delivered at the 14th session of the Human Rights Council, Quakers welcome the progress made in developing new draft UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders, noting that they did addressed only a limited aspect of the problem. The submission highlights QUNO’s draft Framework for Decision-Making in Relation to Children of Offenders, requesting comments. It also welcomes proposed EU research on the issue of children in prison, to fill critical gaps in knowledge.

See also: Children of (Alleged) Offenders: Revised Draft Framework for Decision-Making.

QUNO New York newsletter from June 2010.

Features articles on:

• Finding the Heart of Peacebuilding
• Letter from the Director
• Haiti: Earthquake Response
• Learning from Somali Peace Processes
• China’s Changing Role at the UN
• Preventing Election Violence in Burundi
• Healing and Reconciliation in DRC
• QUNO Staff Changes
• Nuclear Review Conference

In this written statement, Quakers highlight several cases before international human rights mechanisms where conscientious objection to military service is at issue, offering comments and recommendations.

Presented by QUNO New York Director Andrew Tomlinson at the EU-ISS seminar entitled “Peacebuilding and the Security-Development Nexus,” with a particular focus on the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture including the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC).

This paper aims to demonstrate that peacebuilding initiatives can be led by local rather than international players and that this approach can work successfully on a large scale. The paper summarises four peacebuilding initiatives, all more or less locally led, which have operated on a large scale, and which have had real impact in ending violent conflict. It sets out steps that could be taken to move from current practice, in which local capacity for peacebuilding is viewed as marginal, to one where it is regarded as a central element of any strategy for managing conflict.