Call on CAF to stop working on Israeli projects in occupied Palestinian territories
- CAF de Beasain is working on an Israeli contract for the implementation of a train project in the occupied Palestinian territories, which also generates demands for boycott of the Basque company at European level. The Basque Government has also asked the Basque Executive to reject these projects on the day of the CAF shareholders' meeting. The news has been given in Spanish ahotsa.info and ARGIA has translated it into Basque.
On the occasion of the holding of the CAF shareholders’ meeting on Saturday 5 June, several associations grouped in the ‘CAF coalition, crave off the Israeli apartheid train’ have concentrated in front of the CAF headquarters in Beasain.
The Councillor for Economic Development of the Basque Government, Arantza Tapia, and the director of the company internationalization agency of the Basque Government, María Ainhoa Ondarzabal Izaguirre, have received letters on the occasion of the shareholders' meeting. They have been asked to take advantage of their roles, that is, that as government representatives and CAF partners, the company stops working in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Two months ago, Amnesty International sent a letter to CAF shareholders to inform them that the project was illegal and that they used its effects on the shareholders’ meeting to demand the management to abandon the project.
On the other hand, eight Norwegian trade unions have called for a boycott of CAF, the distribution company of Gas Natural. And across Europe there is a campaign calling on public institutions not to hire CAF until the human rights of the Palestinians are respected and participation in JLR (Jerusalem Light Rail) is stopped. In August 2019, the Israeli Ministry of Finance chose an enterprise consortium led by the railway company CAF and the Israeli construction company Shapir to deploy the railway network linking the illegal colonies in the occupied Palestinian territory, known as the Jerusalem Light Rail Train (JLR).
Recently, the Bank of Norway has decided to exclude Mivne Real Estate KD and Shapir Engineering and Industry from the Government’s pension fund because of its membership in CAF and the risk that it may contribute to the violation of human rights for its activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.
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