George Monbiot speaking to hundreds of activists during the first, WDM-sponsored, session - Challenging Privatisation - of the G8 Counter-conference.

Berenice Celeyta (co-founder of NOMADES, which undertakes research and social activism in Columbia and Human Rights Secretary of CINTRA-Cali Trade Union in Columbia).

Berenice Celeyta said that she lived under daily threat of death because of her ethical stance. There had been thousands of deaths of anti-privatisation activists in Columbia even though they were involved in peaceful resistance through such things as occupations and hunger strikes.

She said, "The struggles in my country are the same as those in Africa, in Chile and in Argentina. This is a global problem and we all have an ethical duty to organise and build global resistance at a grassroots level - tell the G8 we are not alone in Columbia!"

Trevor Ngwane (South African Anti-privatisation Forum) told the G8 leaders, "You are the problem, your system. We do not want your charity, you owe us, we demand reparations." He told the people in the UK: "We must unite to fight the system."

Samir Amin, Director of the Third World Forum in Senegal, asking the panel a question.

Walden Bello, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, speaking at the second session on Challenging Global Trade Rules.

When asked a question about whether the WTO should be replaced, Bello said that it should: not with a centralised jurassic system, but with a pluralistic system of checks and balances at the global level that allows developing countries choice in their trade policies to support development. He pointed out that "the kind of trade policies pursued by Asian countries in the 1950s and 1960s would now be deemed illegal under WTO rules."

Samir Amin, Director of the Third World Forum in Senegal, speaking at the second session.

Responding to Gordon Brown's speech yesterday, Amin said that the UK's position on debt cancellation did not go far enough. He claimed that what was needed was an audit of debt and that "an audit of developing country debt would reveal that most of this was odious debt. If there were a law covering international debt in the way that there is for national debt then the IMF, political leaders and corporations would be charged with conspiracy and gangsterism."