Last week’s report from the National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership set out ambitious recommendations not just to incorporate new rights into domestic law but also to strengthen the machinery for making them real. The Taskforce recommends a Scottish human rights bill incorporates (brings into domestic law)
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It’s natural to put ‘food’ into the search box and see what this 135 page document says. But that would miss some of the most important messages. First, of course, the incorporation into Scots law of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This has
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This week’s House of Lords Select Committee report is in many ways familiar reading. The UK’s food system results in shocking inequalities in access to good food especially in the context of COVID, an epidemic of chronic disease, and widespread environmental damage. What’s to be done? The
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This blog post was originally a talk given by Keesje Avis at a webinar entitled “Scotland’s Response to the Climate Emergency” hosted by FoES and partners. See all the presentations here. When talking and thinking about climate change mitigation, we tend to talk about numbers and in
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Brexit was never going to be good for food. The EU, for all its faults, has been progressive on food safety and labelling, on safeguarding local food traditions, on environmental protection, on GM regulation and on animal welfare. The Common Agricultural Policy has been stubbornly misdirected towards
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As the number of people struggling to access food has increased with this crisis, the experience of food insecurity has become much more widespread. Being able to access food safely and with dignity is now on the minds of nearly everyone. This has brought many more people into
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it is concerning that other significant emergency funding packages have fallen back on models of charitable food aid rather than providing direct entitlements. So we need to talk about the UK governments’ obligation to respect human rights, including the right to food during these challenging circumstances.
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Thousands of people have died, and thousands more are bereaved. Jobs are lost, businesses destroyed, hopes and plans in tatters. But it could have been even worse. What if the shops had actually run out of food, not just delivery slots? They didn’t. The massive stocking up,
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As more information has emerged about how coronavirus (COVID-19) will affect day-to-day lives, many of us have felt nervous, scared and confused about how we and our families will cope with the restrictions on our movement and potential health problems that will come. For many, this has
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One of the first lessons we’ve had to learn in this crisis is that running out of food is not a problem of supply. It’s a problem of distribution. £1bn worth of food that would otherwise be on the shelves, is in people’s cupboards and fridges. Meanwhile,
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