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Good morning, this is Paula. With a week to go before Venezuelans head to the polls, Leopoldo López, an exiled opposition leader, shares his hopes that the 28 July presidential vote will herald the end of Chavismo.

Having experienced political repression under the late president Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, López was in Geneva to address the United Nations Human Rights Council about rights violations in his country.

But he is now convinced that the opposition’s candidate, Edmundo González, replacing María Corina Machado, its primary winner, after she was barred, will win the election.

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Paula Dupraz-Dobias

19.07.2024


On our radar


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Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López in Room XX at the Palais des Nations, where the Human Rights Council meets, 3 July 2024. (Le Temps/David Wagnières)

While he may now call Madrid his home, his heart still beats for Venezuela. At 53, Leopoldo López is closely following the electoral campaign for the upcoming presidential election on 28 July. López comes from an influential family. Among his distant ancestors are Cristóbal de Mendoza, Venezuela’s first president, and Simón Bolivar, a political and military icon of Latin America’s liberation from Spanish rule.

The exiled politician had come to the Palais des Nations in Geneva wanting to voice his deep desire for radical change in his country. But he was shocked by the Venezuelan delegation's denial of reality.

As a co-recipient of the Sakharov Prize, he speaks from experience. The former mayor of a municipality in Caracas was barred from public office by the late president Hugo Chavez (1999-2013) and arrested in 2014 by the security forces of his successor, Nicolás Maduro, for peacefully protesting against the government’s abuses. Facing an arrest warrant, he could have remained hidden, gone into exile or surrendered. On 18 February 2014, López chose to turn himself in.

Read the full story on Geneva Solutions


Food for thought


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View of used clothes discarded in the Atacama desert, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile, 26 September 2021. (Keystone/AFP/ Martin Bernetti)

👖RETHINKING FAST FASHION. Amid growing used clothing mountains in Global South countries, a report by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (Unece) and its Latin American counterpart (Eclac) published this week has provided a list of recommendations to avoid the environmental and health impacts from fast fashion waste.

The study found that an overwhelming 80 per cent of clothes are disposed of globally as general garbage that’s incinerated or landfilled. With much of it made from cheap synthetics, the fibres are difficult to separate, making recycling rare and costly.

Moonshot. In Latin America, most countries have introduced bans on imports to avoid competition with local production. But in Chile, where zero levies on clothing exist, discarded outfits dumped in the Atacama desert can now be seen from the moon, covering some 30 hectares of land.

The joint report recommended that Chile and the EU work together on regulatory frameworks, while the textile industry should generally adopt circular economy approaches to improve durability, repairability and recyclability. More recycling plants are needed and measures should be developed to digitally trace used clothing exports.

📃GENDER APARTHEID. A UN General Assembly committee is expected to conclude talks in October for a treaty that would formally outlaw crimes against humanity, which unlike genocide and forced disappearances lacks a international legal framework. Now, a group of women is lobbying the committee to go a step further and include the oppression of women as a crime against humanity. The lobbyists are advocating for a definition of this discrimination as “gender apartheid”.

Feminist academic and New York Law School professor Penelope Andrews explains why broadening the definition of the crime of apartheid to include gender under international law is necessary amid continued discrimination and violence against women in the world. “It could offer significant relief to many victims and survivors who otherwise would not be entitled to adequate recourse from the international community and from states,” she writes in The Conversation.

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