A workshop organized by Focus on the Global South in part of the “Asian People’s Call on Challenging the ADB’s Immunity Conference, held last 20 April 2017 at the University of the Philippines, School of Labor and Industrial Relations.
The session aimed to unpack how the Asian Development Bank’s immunity promotes and propagates corporate and state impunity through various processes and mechanisms such as policy conditionalities, promotion of privatization, and financing of destructive and extractivist projects that undermine people’s and local communities’ rights, livelihoods and self-determination.
The session also highlighted the Bank’s role in human rights abuses and restricting political spaces and channels of information, justice and people’s discourses on development and well-being. The speakers also shared strategies and actions to challenge, limit and end the ADB’s immunity and the state-corporate impunity that it enables.
Lastly, the session featured community leaders, veteran activists, and advocates from Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Mekong and the Philippines.
