Posts Tagged ‘human rights’

Global Witness departure damages Kimberley Process

January 5th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Global Witness recently made a difficult decision to withdraw from its official observatory position of the Kimberley Process (KP) over concerns the scheme was serving “an accomplice to diamond laundering“—a process by which dirty diamonds are mixed with clean ones en route to international markets. The withdrawal of a key stakeholder from an international process to curb the trade in products used to fund deadly conflict raises concerns not only for the integrity of the multistakeholder process that has driven the KP’s evolution, but for efforts on other supply chain issues such as the trade in conflict minerals.

The KP, which Global Witness helped form in 2003, was initially created due to conflicts in Sierra Leone and Angola where the trade in rough diamonds was used to fund conflict and drive massive human rights abuses, to help regulate the sale of certified rough diamonds and remove “blood diamonds” from the international market.

Global Witness’ main concern ahead of the recent withdrawal was KP’s decision in late 2011 “to allow Zimbabwe to export diamonds from the Marange fields, which has been singled out repeatedly by international human rights stakeholders as an area where local government officials are colluding in extensive human rights violations and national authorities have little interest in cleaning up the practices. The NGO also claimed that KP failed to evolve and didn’t address any “clear links between diamonds, violence and tyranny” during the past nine years.

Charmian Gooch, founding director of Global Witness, said in a statement, “Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from, nor whether they are financing armed violence or abusive regimes.

“The scheme has failed three tests: it failed to deal with the trade in conflict diamonds from Ivory Coast, was unwilling to take serious action in the face of blatant breaches of the rules over a number of years by Venezuela, and has proved unwilling to stop diamonds fuelling corruption and violence in Zimbabwe.”

The decision by KP helps pave the ways for others like Anjin Investment, a Chinese-Zimbabwean company, to sell millions of dollars worth of diamonds from the country. There have been allegations Zimbabwean army officers hold senior positions in Anjin, and that some high-ranking officials—top military personnel such as Emmerson Mnangagwa, General Constantine Chiwenga of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), and Colonel Sedz—are “involved in the daily management and operations of [Anjin].”

Gooch reported, “Over the last decade, elections in Zimbabwe have been associated with the brutal intimidation of voters. Orchestrating this kind of violence costs a lot of money. As the country approaches another election there is a very high risk of Zanu PF hardliners employing these tactics once more and using Marange diamonds to foot the bill. The Kimberley Process’s refusal to confront this reality is an outrage.”

Anne Dunnebacke, senior campaigner at Global Witness, stated that “the Zimbabwe incident was the catalyst for the organization’s withdrawal,” but that it wasn’t the only reason.

“We’ve been pushing for reform within the process on a number of issues for many years,” Dunnebacke said. “Over the course of the nine years some improvements have been made and we’ve seen instances where reforms have been adopted. But in recent years that has not been the case. There is next to no political will by governments or industry to reform and make it credible.”

Dunnebacke believes that in order for the industry to take action, a different kind of pressure needs to be applied and vowed Global Witness would remain part of broader campaigns to reform the diamond trade. She claims the industry has stepped back with the excuse, “‘We have the Kimberley Process for diamonds, so that’s that—we’ve solved the problem of blood diamonds.’”

Global Witness has 50 participants worldwide, including the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), with more than 70 countries as its members, who “account for around 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds,” and have all “signed the Kimberley Process agreement to adhere to United Nations-backed safeguards on trade” in the rough diamond field.

Farai Maguwu, director of the Center for Research and Development (CRD) that is based in Zimbabwe, believes that while Global Witness withdrawing wouldn’t collapse the entire KP system, it was “a very big blow.”

Maguwu was arrested in 2010 “as an enemy of the state…allegedly for ‘endangering national security’ by holding information pertaining to the Zimbabwean military’s gross human rights violation at Marange’s diamond mines,” but was cleared of the charges after several civil society movements and local and international NGOs lobbied on his behalf.

“The Kimberley Process will never be the same,” Maguwu said of the Global Witness withdrawal. “A very influential member of the Kimberley Process has cast a vote of no confidence.”

Michael Mann, Catherine Ashton’s spokesman for the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in early December, and after Global Witness withdrew from KP, sent out an e-mail stating that while the KP “may not be a perfect instrument, …it is the best we have, and therefore all parties, including civil society, should work to make it effective.” Mann included, “Abandoning it doesn’t help achieve that common goal.”

The United States became chairman of the KP in the last rotation, a position which was last held by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC’s tenure at the helm was also controversial given that the country is at the heart of trade in “conflict minerals”—tin, tantalum, gold and others—that are the current subject of vociferous campaigning by human rights stakeholders and multistakeholder efforts to address concerns.

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Human Rights and Information Technology, Doing Well and Doing Good

December 8th, 2011
By Erik Wohlgemuth COO, The Future 500

Historically, telephony has been highly regulated while the Internet has not.  With the convergence of mobile telephony and the Internet, a host of regulatory and legal frameworks that manage spectrum and protect individual rights are being challenged for inadequacy.  In the developed world, governments fighting the war on terror want access to individual mobile phone and internet data.  In the developing world, oppressive governments from the Arab world to China, seek to aggressively suppress dissent by monitoring individual mobile phone and internet activity.  Human rights advocates worldwide are vigorously resisting governmental attempts to access individual data and often vilify the companies that comply with governmental requests, calling on companies to increase individual security and anonymity on mobile devices and resist government law enforcement requests.

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FPIC spreads across the Amazon region

September 29th, 2011
Posted by Juliette Terzieff

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala gave proponents of Free, Prior, Informed Consent – or  FPIC – a boost this month when he signed into law a measure that will require consultations with indigenous communities for any projects in the mining, logging or oil and gas industries. The new legislation is a boon for human and indigenous rights groups that have campaigned for greater representation for indigenous groups around the world on land and resource usage.

“We’ve taken an important step to solving a problem, we’re building a republic that respects all its nationalities. What we want to do with this law is have the voice of indigenous people be heard, and have them treated like citizens, not little children who are not consulted about anything,” Humala said after approving the law.

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Cisco encounters more China repression concerns

September 14th, 2011
Posted by Juliette Terzieff

Western technology companies continue to become embroiled in scandals involving the efforts of repressive governments to track and squash dissent through the use of ICT tools. While human rights activists have repeatedly raised the alarm over potential abuses associated with the sale or operation of technology since the early 2000s, the advent of the Arab Spring in 2011 – and the role of ICT tools within it – has thrown the issues firmly into the spotlight.

In protests across the Arab world, cellular telephones and social media have been used by activists to organize locally and spread a message globally. Governments have tried with varying success to limit protesters’ access to the Internet and wireless network systems, moves that surprised few within the global human rights community. The Internet, and social media in particular, proved themselves as popular and potent tools in the hands of pro-reform movements, lending further evidence to the potential of ICT tools to be a powerful force for good.

But in several cases over the last decade Western companies have been accused of selling and/or tailoring technology to aid government repression. Perhaps nowhere have allegations been more persistent than involving operations in China, and now Cisco Systems Inc. finds itself challenged in the U.S. courts.

Cisco has been targeted in a law suit filed on behalf of the Falun Gong by the Human Rights Law Foundation on charges the company customized its products to help Chinese authorities to track members of the movement. Cisco, which has been battling criticism of its operations in China for several years, responded the charges have no basis and the company does not customize “products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression.”

The Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that combines tenets of Buddhism and Taoist tradition, has long been a target of Chinese authorities. The suit claims Cisco products were used to identify and monitor group members who were then detained and tortured by Chinese security forces, and that the company specifically marketed the products to Chinese officials with an emphasis on how they could be used to manage dissident groups. The Human Rights Law Foundation says it has evidence Cisco executives helped train Chinese officials on net surveillance having knowledge of the persecutory campaign against the Falun Gong.

Cisco also faces a second suit, filed by U.S. law firm Ward & Ward on behalf of 13 Chinese political prisoners, on claims the company provided technology and training that contributed to their incarceration. “Cisco has, for years now, knowingly aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to stifle the free speech and discourse of its citizenry,” Daniel Ward charges.

Across the stakeholder spectrum there is broad agreement around the benefits associated with the ICT sector related to promoting sustainability, individual freedoms and development. And while many within the stakeholder community raise questions over sales of monitoring technology to Iran and Bahrain or government requests in places like China, few would want to see the spread of technology limited.

“The Internet is potentially a force for tremendous good from a business perspective, and democracy and sustainability perspectives, so on balance it is good to expand penetration in China,” says Adam Kanzer, Managing Director and General Counsel at Domini Social Investments.

Cisco has encountered concern from stakeholders such as Domini for failing to clearly articulate a human rights policy or provide reporting on rights issues. The case against the company, says Kanzer points to a problem that is not unique to Cisco, that for large companies “even where there is policy or strict guidelines from senior executives, what is happening on the ground may be significantly different.”

Stakeholders advocate clearly articulated policies and worker trainings on human rights issues as ways for companies to promote the issues internally, even in operating environments where there may be significant external challenges. When conducting business in conflict or repression-plagued environments stakeholders expect multinationals to follow the principle of doing no harm.

The suits against Cisco comes amid reports that Cisco and other major companies including Hewlett-Packard and Intergraph are bidding to have their products used as part of China’s “Peaceful Chongqing” surveillance system, according to the Wall Street Journal. The project envisages the deployment of as many as 500,000 cameras over a 400 square mile area in the Chongqing municipality as a crime deterrent. Human rights activists have raised concerns the system will be used to target dissent.

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Censorship fallout from the Arab Spring?

June 29th, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

The use of Internet-based and other ICT tools to drive reform protest movements captured the imaginations of tech-savvy individuals across North Africa and the Middle East over the last year. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter helped drive street demonstrations in a dozen countries and secure international support for reform efforts around the world. But the trend has also drawn the attention of repressive governments and some within the ICT sector fear censorship battles may heat up in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says his company fully expects to be the focus of disagreements with repressive regimes and fears Google employees may be at risk from detention and torture in some countries.

“I think this problem is going to get worse. The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localized to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television,” Schmidt said at the Google-organized Dublin summit on militant violence this week.

“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he continued.

Governments ramping up their efforts to shut down the information highway is something Internet service providers have been grappling with on and off for the last decade. Experience with China’s censorship efforts in particular has drawn significant attention. Yahoo! Inc. faced serious public backlash after its 2002 provision of user information led to the arrest, abuse and imprisonment of Wang Xiaoning.

Since then ICT sector players have clashed on and off with authorities in China, and elsewhere, as the tide of support for universal access has gained prominence. Both Google and Yahoo! are members of the multi-stakeholder Global Network Initiative, an effort to promote freedom of expression and privacy, and like other major ICT companies have initiated efforts to increase access to services in developing countries.

Earlier this month the United Nations affirmed its support of access to the Internet as a human right, with Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue issuing a report making the case for Internet access to enjoy the same legal protections under international standards as other methods of mass communications.

But the practical truth is that as long as authorities maintain control over networks and infrastructure, fully unhindered access to the Internet, its tools and information is still just dream for hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

The U.S. State Department confirmed shortly after the release of La Rue’s report that American authorities are investing millions to fund efforts to bypass government censorship through the use of “shadow” voice and digital communications networks that allow users to send information, according to the New York Times and other media. The benefit, say proponents of alternative networks, is that even in cases where dissidents can use circumvention technologies to sidestep censors, if authorities have slowed down network speeds users may still be unable to post most content.

A variety of innovative options are being considered – some of which sound like they could have come right out from Q’s workshop in a James Bond movie. Consider the following examples cited by the New York Times and other reports:

  • The suitcase project uses small wireless antennas and base stations disguised as suitcases, boxes or bags to help transform electronic devices like cellular telephones or laptop computers and build a wireless Internet network that is outside official control. If authorities seize a unit once a core network is established in an area the other stations will compensate.
  • U.S authorities are helping develop cellular telephone applications, or apps, such as the “panic button” which will erase a cellular telephone’s contact lists and emit an emergency signal to alert other activists.
  • Another idea seeks to build on the use of Bluetooth headsets, which Iranian dissidents have used to transmit data outside authorities’ control. Developers are looking to create a system that allows users to mark data so that when other trusted individuals come into range their mobile devices automatically get the transfer.

Until governments around the world cease efforts to restrict Internet access and the international community develops a legally enforceable mechanism to compel countries to comply, censorship circumvention efforts will remain at the forefront of the battle for fair, equitable universal global access.

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UN highlights Internet access as basic right

June 7th, 2011

Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff

 
Access to the Internet is a basic human right associated with the rights to a free opinion and expression, and any government entity that seeks to block or restrict use is committing a violation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue says in a new report.

La Rue, who heads the office on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, believes the Internet possesses transformative power that not only enables individuals to exercise their rights but contributes to the progress of society over all. As a broad-based communication medium, the special rapporteur argues, the Internet enjoys the same protections provided through standard international norms, such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, as other forms of mass communication and media.

“The Internet is one of the most powerful instruments of the 21st century for increasing transparency in the conduct of the powerful, access to information, and for facilitating active citizen participation in building democratic societies. Indeed, the recent wave of demonstrations in countries across the Middle East and North African region has shown the key role that the Internet can play in mobilizing the population to call for justice, equality, accountability and better respect for human rights,” La Rue said in a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council. “As such, facilitating access to the Internet for all individuals, with as little restriction to online content as possible, should be a priority for all States.”

While governments may legitimately restrict the dissemination of some kinds of information –like child pornography or data that encourages violence or genocide –many governments have been censoring the Internet or blocking access illegally. In some cases, like China, authorities have set up a sophisticated, permanent system to censor available Internet content, while in other places such as Egypt authorities have sought to restrict access as pivotal political moments.

The Center for Democracy & Technology released the latest version of its report “Regardless of Frontiers” as a multi-stakeholder discussion draft in April 2011 looking at increased efforts by governments to control the Internet and putting forth arguments based in international agreements to support access as a guaranteed right. CDT sees the Internet as simultaneously creating great opportunities for individual expression and for governments to seek greater control over the populations.

In 2010, Reports Without Borders noted the growing trend of government attempts to control Internet access with authorities in 60 countries –twice the number of 2009 –imposing some form of censorship. Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam were named by the group as “Enemies of the Internet.” The explosion of the use of ICT tools by the general public, and not just long-time campaigning dissidents, was one of the prime reasons behind the increase, according to the group –a trend that is unlikely to have dissipated given events over the last year in the Middle East and North Africa.

As Reporters Without Borders noted, while some countries like Finland and Estonia have passed legislation guaranteeing Internet access as a basic right, others –such as North Korea, Vietnam and Iran –either block the Internet or routinely harass netizens.

The UN rapporteur’s report broadly commends the private sector for facilitating the transfer of information over networks, continuously developing ICT tools that enable users to access the Internet and for helping to protect the integrity of their services from State interference. The Rapporteur does warn that private companies do, in some cases, face extreme pressure from national authorities and may in the interest of business operations find themselves complicit in violations. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are recognized in the report for their participation in the multi-stakeholder Global Network Initiative.

In addition to access as a right, the UN also sees the Internet and ICT tools as pivotal elements in economic and social development. As we discussed previously,  the world body is supporting multi-stakeholder efforts to achieve universal broadband access for youth around the world to drive positive change and meet education, poverty, health and human rights goals.

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GLENN BECK and MICHAEL MOORE AGREE: 10 Reminders for Republicans and Democrats

March 29th, 2010
From Bill Shireman, President of the Future 500:

Glenn Beck and Michael Moore agree on one thing: If we could just beat the Republicans AND the Democrats this November, maybe we’d have a shot at solving the enormous challenges we face.

But since that’s not likely, I would like to offer ten reminders to each party, to help them avoid some of the failings of their past and present.

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Ruggie’s gonna “know and show”

March 5th, 2010
From Juliette Terzieff, Senior Director, Global Stakeholder Initiatives:

Interaction with United Nations Special Representative John Ruggie is an eye-opener. Well, I guess he’d say “a game changer,” but however you want to phrase it, Ruggie’s work to define roles and recommend parameters for his 3 pillar approach to business and human rights is going to change the way corporations and their stakeholders view human rights.

It’s about time.

For the last couple decades environmental and human rights activists groups have increasingly targeted corporate behavior in their campaigns – there have been some noticeable campaign “victories” and positive changes.

But broadly speaking the systemic problems at the root of issues like child labor, freedom of expression remain. Figuring out the role corporations and their stakeholders can play in addressing them remains a time-intensive conundrum.

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Indian Tribe’s Supporters Liken Battle to ‘Avatar’

February 19th, 2010
From Juliette Terzieff, Senior Director, Global Stakeholder Initiatives:

[Reprinted with permission from World Politics Review]

Human rights activists are turning up the heat on British company Vedanta Resources over charges that its operations threaten the existence of India’s Dongria Kondh tribe. Cast as a “David versus Goliath” fight by the tribe and its supporters, the Vedanta story comes at a time when stakeholders continue to look for a firm definition and application of a community engagement concept known as Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC), to benefit indigenous peoples around the world.

Survival International has appealed to the makers of the blockbuster movie “Avatar” to help the Dongria Kondh fight off mining plans and the pollution resulting from Vedanta’s operations in Orissa state. Vedanta and its subsidiaries already have government approval to expand current aluminum refinery operations and move forward with plans to mine the Niyamgiri Hills for bauxite.

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Working Together

December 30th, 2009
From Juliette Terzieff, Senior Director, Global Stakeholder Initiatives:

Welcome to the Future 500 blog.

To start the New Year, we are delighted to launch the official Future 500 blog, where we invite you to join us in ongoing discussions, analysis and observations to advance the practice of stakeholder engagement in progressing systemic solutions to society’s critical sustainability challenges.

In the waning days of 2009 I find myself looking back on a tumultuous year full of critical events that affect all the world’s citizens.

Each of us has a stake in our collective future — a future that in 2009 continued to be endangered by global economic turmoil and international policy failures, increasing frequency of natural disasters, effects of climate change and decreasing availability of finite natural resources – to name just a few of the year’s challenges!

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