MANIFIESTO

In Spain, as in a great part of the international community, public opinion supports peace and opposes war. At the same time, society is ever more concerned with preserving the quality of the environment and with the defence of human rights as a universal good, a concern expressed in the growing demand for more ethical practices in the business world that would mean a socially more just, more sustainable planet.

Countless ongoing armed conflicts, the unjust wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, the undermining of human rights under the pretext of fighting international terrorism as well as the growing destruction of non-renewable natural resources with accompanying environmental pollution and loss of biodiversity are leading to the impoverishment of mankind and the death of the planet. This situation is producing greater awareness among the citizenry of problems affecting humanity.

This set of problems has led to our decision to launch a campaign aimed at increasing awareness of and speaking out against financial entities that participate in military industries or seriously disrupt the lives of communities and peoples. The campaign has been named BBVA sense Armes (BBVA without Arms) (www.bbvasensearmes.org).

At the Barcelona Commission of Justice and Peace, an organisation with a long history of defending human rights, peace and social justice, we have created the J. M. Delas Centre for Peace Studies, which carries out research in favour of peace and disarmament with particular attention given to arms production, sales and traffic. It was the Centre that drew up the table showing the investments of BBVA and other financial institutions in arms-manufacturing companies (see above-cited web page).

The Observatory on Debt and Globalisation, a research network coordinated by the UNESCO Centre for Sustainability at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is particularly known for its active support of and participation in the Who Owes Whom campaign, which has highlighted the North’s real debt to the South and the fallaciousness and artificiality of the South’s external debt. It has also carried out a number of studies on the corporate social and environment irresponsibility of certain Spanish companies operating in non-industrialised countries and supplied the campaign with the data regarding BBVA’s disrespect for the environment and human rights (see web page).

Those individuals and organisations signing the Manifesto are launching the BBVA without Arms campaign (www.bbvasensearmes.org) with the goal of:

Creating a climate of public opinion conducive to a change of attitude among financial institutions, most notably the BBVA Corporation, that would result in their incorporating measures to guarantee respect for human rights and the preparation of social and environmental impact studies in all operations they finance and in all business activities in which they participate as stockholders, whether directly or indirectly, and as a consequence, their termination of ownership in and financing of arms manufacturers and heavily polluting companies.

The campaign’s sole goal is to promote authentic respect for human rights and the environment wherever financial institutions, particularly BBVA, have offices or fund or participate in projects by getting them to incorporate more ethical practices in their investments and internal corporate practices in the interest of achieving a more just, more livable planet for all of mankind.