On July 28th, the newly formed Washington Community Rights Network released The Spokane Declaration (below), calling upon communities across the state to join together in a movement to elevate the rights of people, their communities, and nature above the claimed rights of corporations.
This comes with an understanding, as stated in the Declaration, that our communities are under siege from corporations exploiting our communities for resource extraction and a variety of other uses harmful to us and the natural environment... from a structure of law that has bestowed greater rights on those corporations than the communities in which they operate...
The creation of the Washington Community Rights Network comes out of active community campaigns on both sides of the Cascades, including Proposition 2 in Bellingham, Initiative 103 in Seattle and Proposition 3 in Spokane.
Specifically, The Spokane Declaration calls on communities to:
* Adopt local laws that recognize community rights for residents of Washington municipalities and the natural environment;
* Include in those local laws direct challenges to the legal doctrines that currently mandate that corporations have greater rights than residents of our communities or the natural environment;
* Build a statewide coalition of communities to change the State Constitution to recognize our right to local self-government eliminating these legal doctrines at the State level, to protect the local laws adopted within our municipalities; and
* Join together with other statewide movements to change the federal Constitution to elevate the rights of people, communities, and nature above the claimed rights of corporations.
Read the full document below or here. Learn more about the Washington Community Rights Network here or contact Kai Huschke 509.607.5034 / info@celdf.org.
