Ottawa / February 13, 2009 – Maude Barlow delivered a plenary session speech yesterday on 'the vision and expectations of peoples' at the 'Peace with Water' conference at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, which concludes today. This international conference was organized by the World Political Forum, in collaboration with European Parliamentary Groups and the European Research Institute on Water Policy.

Barlow, the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, was joined at the conference by other prominent speakers including Mikhail Gorbachev (President of the World Political Forum), Hans-Gert Pöttering (President of the European Parliament), Danielle Mitterrand (President of the France-Libertés Foundation), and Prince Albert II of Monaco.

Barlow endorsed the conference’s proposed Memorandum for a World Water Protocol, and momentum is building to include it in the international negotiations of the successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. European Water News reports that, "The protocol will focus on conflict prevention, the promotion of the right to water for all, and the safeguard of the global water heritage for future generations."

Barlow told the hundreds of parliamentarians, locally elected officials, administrators, academics, and government, union, and civil society representatives there that:

• water is a human right and that she is working with the President of the United Nations to create a protocol on the right to water;
• water is a public trust, a global commons and a public service;
• nature has rights; and that enough water must be left in the eco-system for the health of the hydrologic cycle and watershed health;
• the European Union should ban bottled water;
• all decisions about water must be democratic, transparent and involve the local communities they affect; and
• we must learn to live within our own water footprint and not abuse the water supplies of poor countries.