A/HRC/24/38 Today the inequality bequeathed by colonialism and maintained by the post colonialism remains unbearable, the public debt is now a heavy burden on the economies of the majority of states and leads them to inflict austerity policies on their people to the detriment of the necessary satisfaction of their most basic economic, social and cultural rights as proclaimed by the United Nations Covenant in 1966. These policies violate the social development goals defined by Articles 55 et seq., of the United Nations Charter and confirmed by U.N. General Assembly Resolution of 4 December 1986 on the Right to Development. The result is a fundamental economic political and societal crisis on a scale constituting a crisis of civilization, posing the most serious dangers to humanity. However, this situation is not an accident of fate. It is the result of the management of the world’s economy, based on the savagery of economic liberalism and the resulting dictatorship of financial markets. The world’s economy is governed by a system which exploits the world’s resources, not as a function of their value to humanity but of their value as profit for finance capital. Even the so-called "local conflicts" are in fact conflicts between the powers that compete for resources and markets, in which the arms trade plays a particularly burdensome role. Massive violations of human rights that appear as purely internal are most often the work of dictatorships established by the neo-colonizer guaranteeing them economic mastery and security of access to resources and markets. The future of Humanity is at stake as long as the political power of the peoples is not completed by their economic power. This completion will permit placing the organization of world economic management under international universal and egalitarian law of the United Nations Charter and replacing non-egalitarian International financial institutions by people’s instruments of cooperation allowing the planet’s resources to be directed to the exclusive satisfaction of peoples’ and the environments respective and common needs. We believe that the world’s lawyers should serve the people in the front line of this struggle, which calls on them to use and improve their professional skills in the service of peoples to achieve the common goal of Peoples’ Power. We have therefore decided to establish a permanent consultative working group to define those steps which should be taken immediately to counter effectively the malfunctioning of the current order and towards establishing a new democratic international economic order. Appel de Blois, Liberté pour l'histoire, 2008 (full text)11 XI. Concerned about the retrospective moralization of history and intellectual censure, we call for the mobilization of European historians and for the wisdom of politicians. History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories. In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions. We call on historians to marshal their forces within each of their countries and to create structures similar to our own, and, for the time being, to individually sign the present appeal, to put a stop to this movement toward laws aimed at controlling history memory. We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an 11 38 http://www.lph-asso.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&Itemid=14&lang=en