Never Be Silent

Success!!!! From Reuters, excerpt:

BOSTON, Jan 4 (Reuters) - TIAA-CREF has become the first large U.S. fund firm to sell stakes in a group of Asian energy companies over human rights concerns in Sudan.

The sales of shares of China’s PetroChina Co Ltd (601857.SS), CNPC Hong Kong (0135.HK) and Sinopec (600028.SS), and Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC.BO) of New Delhi totaled $42.7 million, TIAA-CREF said on Monday.

The move could lead to a renewed round of pressure on the companies over their business ties to Sudan’s government, which is widely accused of war crimes.

The sales by TIAA-CREF, which provides financial services to nonprofits like hospitals and universities, also mark a milestone for rights activists who have tried for years — mostly in vain — to line up the influential fund industry behind its social agenda.

From the BBC, in its entirety:

A Dutch court has ruled it has the authority to hear a case brought by a group of Nigerian farmers against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell.

The four farmers claim a subsidiary of Shell is responsible for contaminating their land in the Niger Delta.

They are seeking compensation and assurances that Shell will clean up the land polluted by alleged oil spills.

Shell denies any responsibility and had argued that the court has no authority in the case.

It said the spills, which sprung from a leak from a high-pressure pipeline in 2005 in Bayelsa State, were caused by sabotage by militant groups that have been fighting in the region.

Shell expressed “disappointment” at the ruling.

“We believe there are good arguments on the basis of which the district court could have concluded that it lacks jurisdiction in respect of these purely Nigerian matters.”

In a separate case earlier this year, Shell agreed to pay millions of dollars to a group of Nigerians over alleged abuses of their rights in the Delta region.

Although Shell paid compensation, it did not accept responsibility for rights abuses.

From Change.org and Amnesty International. Please sign the petition and spread the word!

Targeting: Edward Johnson (Chairman, Fidelity Investments), James Dimon (CEO, JP Morgan Chase) and Charles Johnson (Chairman of the Board, Franklin Resources)

Sponsored by: Amnesty International USA

Call on the most powerful companies in the world to use their influence to help end the human rights catastrophe in Darfur.

Despite international diplomatic pressure, the Government of Sudan continues to impede the deployment of UN-African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, leaving countless civilians vulnerable to armed attack, rape, and displacement.

To ensure the speedy and full deployment of this peacekeeping force, the Government of Sudan must receive pressure from key economic interests, including the oil companies they depend on for 90% of their export revenue.

To convince these oil companies to act, we must enlist their investors as our allies.  In the past year several top U.S. investment firms have committed to raising concerns about Darfur with oil companies in which they are invested.  But the large majority of investors are still ignoring the issue and hoping it will just go away.  In the meantime, more lives are being lost.

Please call on these investment companies to take a stand for the people of Darfur today.

From the Huffington Post, excerpt:

A CIGNA employee gave the finger — literally — to a woman whose daughter died after the insurance giant refused to cover her liver transplant.

Hilda and Krikor Sarkisyan went to CIGNA’s Philadelphia headquarters, along with supporters from the California Nurses Association, to confront the CEO Edward Hanway over the death of her 17-year-old child.

In 2007, Nataline Sarkisyan was denied a liver transplant by the company, on the grounds that the operation was “too experimental” to be covered. Nine days later it changed its mind, in response to protests outside its office. It was too late: Nataline died hours later.

“CIGNA killed my daughter,” Nataline’s mother Hilda told security. “I want an apology.” Sarkisyan was not able to speak to Hanway; a communications specialist talked to her instead. After their conversation, employees heckled the group from a balcony; one man gave them the finger. CIGNA called the police and had the family and their friends escorted from the building.

From BBC News, excerpt:

South Africa’s government has backed a bid by apartheid victims to sue firms in the US - reversing the position of the previous administration.

A group of South Africans is taking legal action against the companies in a court in New York’s southern district.

Daimler, Fujitsu, General Motors, IBM and Rheinmetall are accused of aiding and abetting South Africa’s former apartheid regime.

In April, a US court dismissed similar claims made against UBS and Barclays.

The plaintiffs have welcomed President Jacob Zuma’s support for their case.

Among other things, they claim that the companies produced parts for vehicles which were used to carry out the assassinations of liberation movement activists and unprovoked shootings of black people during the apartheid years.

“I was tortured and sentenced to five years on Robben Island. I have shrapnel and a bullet in my skull,” said one complainant Mpho Masemola, the Sowetan newspaper reports.

Mr Masemola was one of thousands in the country who were arrested under the notorious Section 29 of the Internal Security Act which gave the white-minority government and its police force the power to detain anti-apartheid political activists in solitary confinement for years.

“Those companies must pay for the years of my interrupted education. Had I not been arrested I would be a doctor by now,” he says.

From the Guardian, excerpts:

BP and Shell are being told to tear up their membership of the American Petroleum Institute (API) in protest at the organisation’s attempts to incite a public backlash against Barack Obama’s energy and climate change bill.

The two oil companies are also being asked to bring a halt to their own political lobbying in Washington in letters sent to their chief executives from Greenpeace and the Platform environmental group.

The letter also questions the $8m (£4.8m) worth of spending on lobbying in Washington since the start of 2009, saying this runs against the commitment made by BP’s former boss, Lord Browne, in 2002 that BP would from now on “make no political contributions from corporate funds anywhere else in the world”. A similar letter has been sent to Peter Voser, the new boss at Shell.

The demands from Greenpeace follow revelations in the Guardian last Friday that the API was pumping money into a series of “citizen rallies” to put pressure on the Obama administration over its support for a climate change bill sponsored by Congressmen Henry Waxman and Edward Markey which comes before the Senate next month.

The proposed legislation, which has already successfully passed through the House of Representatives, marks a clear move by the US to adopt a greener political and economic agenda and ditch the kind of sceptical views on global warming that were the hallmark of the previous government run by George W Bush, himself a former oilman.

An email sent by Jack Gerard, president of the API, says the lobby group will provide “upfront resources” to pay for a highly experienced events company to organise the public protest meetings, but it says oil companies themselves should encourage their staff to go to some of the 20 rallies being considered.

“In the 11 states with an [oil] industry core, our member company local leadership – including your facility manager’s commitment to provide significant attendance – is essential,” the note says.

Greenpeace and Platform believe these actions are “astroturfing” – a determined attempt to create a false appearance of popular opposition to the Obama plans to control carbon emissions from oil while boosting wind and other cleaner technologies. The environmentalists remind Hayward and Voser that their companies were once members of the API-backed Global Climate Coalition in the US which successfully campaigned against it signing the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that there was not enough proof that global warming was being made worse by man-made carbon dioxide pollution.

From Amnesty International USA’s blog, in its entirety:

Prominent US and multinational companies such as Apple, Dell, Motorola, Nokia, and Hewlett-Packard are among the businesses pinpointed as culprits in an unflinching, new report released by Global Witness that details the often noxious connections between the illegal mining trade, widespread human rights abuses and tech and mining firms.

The detailed analysis provides excellent current background on the situation, and names the names of companies operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that trade in minerals in ways that ignore corporate social responsibility and perpetuate the conflict.

High-tech human rights abuses

The illegal mining and horrific human rights abuses against civilians – including the use of child soldiers and sexual violence as a weapon of war – have previously prompted a UN Expert Panel review that resulted in a large number of companies reforming their activities or leaving the country.  Yet the new Global Witness report is clear: “no effective action has been taken to stop this murderous trade.”per se, but is focusing on stopping the mining intertwined with conflict and abuse. Global Witness states that it is not calling for a complete trade embargo or targeting artisanal mining

In many ways, the DRC’s plight hearkens back to colonialism and chartered companies empowered to make war in order to capture resources.  But today’s neo-colonialism is more indirect and up-to-date, being linked to some of the world’s most sophisticated new technologies.  The minerals cassiterite (tin ore) and coltan are important components in cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices, and the DRC is a primary global source.

Violations in the region have continued despite the recent rapprochement between the DRC and Rwanda and the integration into the Congolese army of one of the leading rebel groups (the Congrès national pour la défense du people, or CNDP, whose leader Bosco Ntaganda is wanted by the International Criminal Court).  Both the army and remaining rebel groups such as the Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Rwanda (FDLR) are implicated in the illegal mining and abuses – even cooperating at times with each other as well as with the companies to share the spoils.  Rule of law in the DRC is either weak or, in many provinces, effectively absent.

The new report states that the named companies exploiting this lack of oversight had almost no controls or due diligence processes to ensure that their supply chain contained no conflict minerals.

Global brands such as many of these companies  participate in industry initiatives including the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct which require them to hold suppliers to high standards.  Yet “suppliers” has often been interpreted to apply to middlemen but not suppliers further down the supply chain.

Apple’s stance leaves much to be desired

When questioned about these specific practices and their obligations to uphold certain standards, companies generally pointed to generic corporate social responsibility statements.  Only in rare cases did companies seem to recognize the need for greater due diligence.  In most cases, no sense of urgency or clear commitment to applying checks to the entire supply chain was expressed.  Instead, companies relied frequently on the fact that they purchased from licensed exporters.

In a statement accompanying release of the report, Global Witness Director Patrick Alley stated:

It is not good enough for companies to say they buy only from licensed exporters, when they know full well that their middlemen buy from armed groups. The failure of governments to hold companies to account, of Burundi and Rwanda to restrict the trade across their borders, and of donors and diplomats to address explicitly the role of the mineral trade, have all contributed to the continuation of a conflict that has killed millions and displaced many more.

Apple’s response was a bare bones reference to its supplier responsibility policy (via a web link that no longer works).  Nokia, at least, gave the more commendable explanation that while it purchases raw materials through suppliers rather than directly, this “does not change the fact that we have the responsibility over everything that goes into making a Nokia product.”

Hewlett-Packard has room for improvement

Hewlett-Packard’s response shows similar progress in understanding the issue, with the company explaining that it has focused on first-tier suppliers where it thinks it “has the most influence” (an assumption that may be questioned when the underlying harms and their locations are considered).  But HP has successfully reached down to many second-tier suppliers as well, via its first tier suppliers (who have told HP that DRC coltan is “not used in their products supplied to HP”).  HP presumably does not merely accept such assertions (which would be akin to the U.S. government accepting diplomatic assurances that the countries to whom it sends terror suspects “do not torture”), but audits them to some extent.  And HP has the reputation of being better than most companies at such audit processes, stating that it is working with the first-tier suppliers of notebook computers to “map their supply chain down to the extractives level.”

Lukewarm responses Motorola and Dell

The responses from Motorola and Dell were in-between the extremes represented by the nonchalant reply from Apple, on the one hand, and the more detailed and responsive replies from Nokia and HP, on the other.  Motorola and Dell stated that they require high standards in their supply chains, expect their suppliers to do the same, and participate in industry initiatives to that end.

Moving toward real social corporate responsibility

Laudable industry initiatives such as the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) do aim to enhance traceability of minerals beyond supplier certifications to the actual mines involved, but thus far have failed to change what Nokia rightly calls a status quo that is “not  … acceptable.”

The continued corporate role in this conflict remains shameful and underappreciated but fundamental.  The new Global Witness report usefully reawakens slumbering attention, and clearly demonstrates the need for strengthened accountability mechanisms that truly end what the report calls “the impunity protecting those engaged in illicit mineral exploitation and trade.”

In addition to illustrating the grave risks faced by the extractive industry and companies active in conflict situations, the new report provides sensible recommendations for direly needed urgent actions by governments, corporations, individuals, the UN, and the international community at large to finally call a halt to the ongoing tragedy in the DRC.

Chip Pitts is a lecturer at Stanford Law School, former Chief Legal Officer of Nokia Inc., and former Chair of Amnesty International USA.  He is the co-author and editor of the new book, Corporate Accountability: A Legal Analysis (Lexis Nexis 2009); all the royalties from book sales will benefit human rights and sustainability charities.

We’ve all heard about how Nokia’s shady business practices, in direction violation of their Code of Conduct, has faciliatated the crackdown on demonstrators in Iran. Sadly, they’re not the only company out there that is practicing in a less-than-ethical way. Shell, for example, is a human rights nightmare.

From Amnesty International, excerpt:

Communities in the Niger Delta frequently do not have access to even basic information about the impact the oil industry has on their lives — even when they are the “host” community. This lack of information feeds fears and insecurity within communities, contributes to conflict and fundamentally undermines human rights.

Shell has made commitments to human rights and to “manage the social impacts of its business activities carefully and work with others to enhance the benefits to local communities and to mitigate any negative impacts from our activities”. A crucial aspect of ensuring that corporate action respects human rights is the assessment of risks to human rights and the disclosure of information on how corporate operations will affect people. This has been clearly acknowledged by the United Nation’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General on business and human rights.

But in the Niger Delta Shell does not do this.

Shell has — in its Business Principles - recognised the importance of information and made a commitment to “reporting of our performance by providing full relevant information to legitimately interested parties, subject to any overriding considerations of business confidentiality.”

As organisations working with communities in the Niger Delta, we are calling on Shell to make good on this commitment…