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GLOBAL WITNESS
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Global Witness is an organisation that exposes the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and international trade mechanisms. Having identified an issue, they implement campaigns seek to end resource-linked conflict, and human rights and environmental abuses. We all have our way of contributing to society, mine is to try to do something to show world leaders and future generations that alternative energy can be practical. I'm doing this by building a solar powered boat featured elsewhere on this website, with the intention of proving it during a world circumnavigation.
Where I've been on the receiving end of local authority attention gone mad over a prolonged period, I can tell you some stories about the oppressed and discrimination. In fact it was the Human Rights Act coming into law in the UK, that finally put a stop to a vendetta that could have completely ruined me after a few more years. Thus I am a firm believer in fair treatment, fair trade and equal opportunities. I'm also an engineer and an environmentalist, a strange combination I know, but, for all the above reasons I applaud the sterling efforts of all those who work for Global Witness. They are working for our precious blue planet and all those who inhabit it. NK
Nelson Kruschandl - well done chaps!
Global Witness was the first organisation that sought to break the links between the exploitation of natural resources, and conflict and corruption; and the results of our investigations and our powerful lobbying skills have been not only a catalyst, but a main driver behind most of the major international mechanisms and initiatives that have been established to address these issues; including the Kimberley Process and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Global Witness is largely responsible for natural resources occupying the prominent role in the international agenda that they currently do.
Global Witness was the first organisation that sought to break the links between the exploitation of natural resources, and conflict and corruption; and the results of our investigations and our powerful lobbying skills have been not only a catalyst, but a main driver behind most of the major international mechanisms and initiatives that have been established to address these issues; including the Kimberley Process and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Global Witness is largely responsible for natural resources occupying the prominent role in the international agenda that they currently do.
And away from the policy arena, Global Witness' hard-hitting investigations have had direct and major impacts, such as the IMF withdrawal from Cambodia in 1996 over corruption in the logging industry, the imposition of timber sanctions on Charles Taylor's Liberia in 2003, and the precedent-setting arrest and conviction of arms trafficker and timber baron Gus Kouwenhoven, in the Netherlands in 2006.
Despite the great strides made in the first decade of Global Witness' existence, the struggle to ensure that natural resource exploitation is equitable and sustainable is still in its early stages. Resource-fuelled wars such as those that shattered the DRC, Liberia, Angola and Cambodia could happen again tomorrow, and add to a death toll that has topped over six million since the late 1990's, because the international community has not addressed the trade in conflict resources.
The competition between the old and emerging powers to secure the world's remaining oil reserves is escalating, perhaps dangerously so. The scramble by extractive industries to secure exploitation rights over the world's mineral wealth, whilst at the same time resisting any kind of regulation that would enforce good practice, threatens some of the planet's poorest populations, whilst the world's dwindling forests, home to millions of people and reservoirs of biodiversity, continue to face an onslaught by some of the most corrupt regimes and companies, bent on satisfying an insatiable demand for timber regardless of cost.
Natural resources could be the key to ending Africa's poverty, and making it, and other areas of the developing world, the economic powerhouses they should be. But Global Witness believes that neither governments nor industry have shown the leadership or the vision to create the sea change in the international architecture that is necessary to make natural resources a benefit and not a curse.
MONEY LENDERS
Behind every one of the corrupt natural resource deals that Global Witness investigates, there is a route for the money. It is not just the corrupt officials and the companies prepared to pay bribes or shroud their deals in secrecy who allow corruption to take place. The other - frequently invisible - players are the banks, offshore shell companies, accountants and lawyers who can make the stolen money disappear, or provide the funding for predatory deals. Financial institutions can play a key role in funding, fuelling and facilitating conflict and in abetting grand corruption in natural resource-rich countries. Until their role is brought to light, and their capacity to handle dirty money is impeded, corruption - and the poverty and conflict that it fuels - will continue.
Global Witness investigates the role of financial institutions in supporting corruption and conflict, and uses this information to exert pressure on policy-makers, law-enforcers and the financial industry itself to make the global financial architecture more transparent, just and accountable.
OIL RESERVES
Many countries that are rich in oil, gas and other minerals are nonetheless mired in poverty and poor government because the public revenues earned from selling these resources have been squandered through corruption and lack of government accountability to citizens.
Citizens of resource-rich countries cannot hold their governments to account, and ensure that mineral resources are used in a fair and sustainable way, unless they have full information about the management of these resources.
Through field investigations and high-level advocacy, we work to increase transparency in the flow of revenues from oil, gas and mining companies to governments, as well as more transparency in the award of mineral concessions, the trading of resources and the role of banks and other middlemen in resource-related corruption.
FORESTS
Forests are not like other resources: people live in and depend on them and what they contain; the poorer the people, the greater the dependence. Forests are of immense ecological importance and are also one of the last bastions against climate change. Despite all this, the almost automatic response from the international donor community, especially the World Bank, and from the governments of the producer countries themselves, is to regard industrial export-based logging as a key economic driver that can kick-start the economies of poor countries, but the major problem with this approach, in tropical forests at least, is that it demonstrably doesn't work. In virtually every country where this has been tried, illegal logging and corruption have triumphed over economic theory, resulting in vast revenue loss, exacerbation of poverty, human rights abuses, environmental destruction and, too often, full scale timber-fuelled war.
Global Witness is working to change international thinking on forest exploitation, to ensure that forests are a benefit to the communities that depend on them, and are regarded as an international asset.
The Amazon and DRC possess the two largest remaining tropical forest blocks in the world, and Global Witness believes the world cannot afford to put these global assets at risk by subjecting them to tried and tested theories that do not work. Despite many initiatives surrounding forest law enforcement, timber certification, chain of custody tracking and attempts to ban the trade in illegal timber, deforestation increases every year, with implications that include releasing 18% of total global CO2 emissions - more than the entire global transport sector.
Douglas Farah and Alex Yearsley - Future of Peace 2005
The Future of Peace Operations program invited Alex Yearsley, a founder of Global Witness, and Douglas Farah, freelance writer and former Washington Post journalist, to discuss conflict fueled by illicit trade and illegal resource exploitation in West Africa.
The speakers addressed the potential of UN mechanisms such as peace operations and investigative Panels of Experts for stymieing illicit activities that help fund warring factions. Mr. Yearsley described the need for expanded UN mandates to authorize explicitly peacekeepers' assistance in restoring governmental control over natural resources and commodities. Mr. Farah highlighted both achievements and deficiencies of the Panels of Experts. The investigations of some Panels have yielded impressively in-depth details about the make-up and methods of illicit networks.
Other Panels have been too shallow in their reports, failing to either uncover significantly new information or offer names of the complicit. Panels have also been undermined by a lack of UN follow-up on their findings. Farah noted that the key determinants of Panels' effectiveness are the personalities of individual Panel members - especially their willingness to criticize influential individuals - and the political will of UN Member States to implement Panel recommendations.
Alex Yearsley is a senior manager at Global Witness working on a number of key campaigns. He was involved with the conflict diamond campaign since conception and ran the campaign for a number of years. The campaign was jointly nominated with Partnership Africa Canada for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. He has been at Global Witness since 1997 and previously worked on both the Cambodia and Oil transparency campaigns. Alex has a degree in theology from Edinburgh University and was briefly a presenter for MTV Europe. He has been investigating the diamond trade for about seven years and is one on only two people to have been at every Kimberly Process negotiating meeting.
PRESS RELEASES
The links below allow you access Global Witness reports, press releases, briefing documents, videos and audio clips. You are able to search for the information you need by using the menu to the left of your screen.
CONTACTS
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+1 202 721 5670 If you have a general enquiry, please email mail@globalwitness.org.
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