Guest's blog

This guest post comes from Yewande Ajoke Agboola, a law student at University of Maryland School of Law currently interning with our campaigns team in Washington DC. At the event described below, Ajoke was accompanied by Jirawat ("Cook") Suriyashotichynagkul, a Thai legal fellow from our Southeast Asia office, currently visiting our US office after attending American University's Washington College of Law's summer session on Environmental Law.

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On Monday, Cook and I participated in our very first protest! A couple of blocks from the Brazilian embassy we gathered with other young activists to protest the construction of the Belo Monte dam located on the Xingu River, in the Brazilian Amazon. If completed, it will be the third largest dam in the world and would displace approximately 20,000 indigenous peoples from 18 different ethnic groups, including the Juruna, Xikrín, Arara, Xipaia, Kuruaya, Parakanã, Araweté, and Kayapó.

The use of private security contractors has blossomed in recent years as the U.S. remains engaged in activities in Afghanistan and Iraq that include the ever present use of non-military security personnel. These private employees operate at the behest of the U.S. military and other agencies, including the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), often operating with little oversight of their operations or legal accountability for actions they commit abroad. This is a huge problem and an area ripe for action to close this gap. 

This past Monday, the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent bipartisan commission created to study wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, held a hearing entitled “Ensuring contractor accountability: Past performance and suspensions and debarmements”. 

The Commission heard testimony from a number of speakers, including Scott Amey, General Counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, who amplified the concerns of many about the detrimental effects of lacking oversight over contractors. Mr. Amey stated that the “government should be concerned when contracts are awarded to risky contractors…Continuing to award contracts to such contractors undermines the public’s confidence in the fair-play process and exacerbates distrust in our government. It also results in bad deals for the government and hinders mission accomplishment.” 

Such revelations are not new.  In fact, both the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction have found massive waste associated with contractors, estimating that between $3 billion to $5 billion in U.S.-funded infrastructure contracting had been wasted in Iraq and warning that the entire $11.4 billion for constructing and maintaining nearly 900 Afghan National Security Forces facilities is at risk due to inadequate planning.   

This guest post comes from lawyer and writer Shauna Curphey, who is volunteering for a year in ERI's Thailand office.

 

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Last month marked the first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which struck down a federal law limiting corporate and union spending in elections. In reaching its decision, the Court overruled its 1990 decision, which held that the government could restrict corporate campaign spending to prevent corporations from obtaining an unfair advantage in the political marketplace. In short, in Citizens United, the Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals to engage in political speech.

 

In the year since the Citizens United decision, efforts have sprung up across the country to call for a constitutional amendment to limit corporate rights. Most recently, Rep. Donna Edwards of Maryland introduced a constitutional amendment that would explicitly allow Congress and the states to regulate corporate campaign spending (see video below). Other efforts, including a recent resolution introduced in the Vermont legislature, call for a constitutional amendment that provides that corporations are not persons under the law and thus would strip corporations of rights, such as free speech, that individuals enjoy.

 

Although amending the Constitution is no easy task – Congress must first pass a proposal that is then ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures – the amendment efforts will, at the least, nourish a broader conversation about corporate hegemony. People are listening; in a recent national poll, 80 percent of respondents said they opposed allowing unfettered corporate spending on political campaigns.

This post was authored by Laura, a volunteer English teacher at the Social Development Center (SDC). The Social Development Center was established in 2002 by four Karenni alumni of the EarthRights School Burma (ERSB).

The vision of SDC is to promote the lives of those refugees who have suffered human rights abuses, teach non-violent methods of social change, develop the rule of law, value human dignity and protect the environment. Graduates from the SDC have gone on to work in many local refugee camp based organizations, whilst others have travelled at great personal risk to pass on their new knowledge and skills to affected communities within Burma.

ERI and SDC are lucky to have the support of volunteers like Laura, who donate their time and effort in support of our work.

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I am currently volunteering for 3 months as an English teacher at the Social Development Center in Northern Thailand, and although I’m only one month in so far, I've already had a life changing experience! The students are some of the most motivated, clever, and hardworking people I’ve ever met - and they are also so friendly, optimistic and respectful as well, which is so surprising given the current situation within their state in Burma. They try hard at every subject and are always eager to learn new things, and share their stories with me. Their dreams of the future largely involve giving back to their communities or improving their people's situation, and helping others in any way possible - it is amazing how selfless these youths are, something I’ve rarely seen in the western world.

The other teachers are also inspirational role models, full of knowledge and ideas, and are working hard to improve the quality of education of the people in the camp and the future generation.

SDC classroom

This post was contributed by an anonymous intern on ERI's campaigns team.

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Despite rich endowments of energy resources like oil and natural gas, Burma continues to struggle with electricity shortages. Back in 2006, the junta decided to try to address these shortages by requiring all farmers with at least an acre of land to plant jatropha, a physic nut that can be used to create biofuel. Proponents of jatropha say that the plant has many advantages. It’s not edible and therefore doesn’t compete with the food supply, they claim, and can also survive in harsh climates with little water. The promise of jatropha has led to numerous investments in plantations in Asia, South America and Africa.

But since the jatropha craze started in the mid-2000’s, there’s been increasing skepticism from both industry insiders and observers about the merits of jatropha. The Food and Agriculture Organization noted that despite increasing investment and policy decisions on jatropha, there was “little evidence-based information” to inform these actions. A major recent report on jatropha production by Friends of the Earth, entitled “Jatropha: money doesn’t grow on trees,” challenges some of the most fundamental motivations for growing jatropha, including its ability to thrive in harsh and dry climates and its lack of competition with the food supply.

According to the report, jatropha may in fact be less efficient for producing biofuels than other currently available plants. One study cited in the report suggests that jatropha actually needs more water than any other biofuel crop to produce the same amount of oil (FOE report, p. 6). Its ability to thrive in harsh climates also appears overstated, according to Rob Bailis of Yale University. He said that “if you plant trees in a marginal area, and all they do is just not die, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get a lot of oil from them.” Despite claims that jatropha won’t compete for arable land with food crops, plantations across Africa and Asia have sprung up not on marginal lands, but on land previously used for food crop farming.

This guest post comes from Leina Ley, a third year law student at Berkeley Law and a recent legal intern in ERI's Washington DC office. Leina is Native Hawaiian and is interested in indigenous rights, civil rights, and environmental justice.

 

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Last week at the second annual White House Tribal Nations Conference, President Obama announced that the United States would join the rest of the world and endorse the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The announcement by President Obama marks a significant milestone in U.S. relations with Native peoples as well as in the development of international human rights law. While the Declaration is a non-binding legal document, it outlines key rights to guide states in their relationships with indigenous groups, such as the right to speak indigenous languages, to keep native children within the community and to access and use traditional lands. The Declaration also explicitly recognizes the history of dispossession, marginalization and colonization shared by indigenous peoples the world over who came together to secure the passage of the Declaration.

This guest post comes from Leina Ley, a third year law student at Berkeley Law and a 2010 legal intern in ERI's Washington DC office. Leina is Native Hawaiian and is interested in indigenous rights, civil rights, and environmental justice.

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As the latest round of climate talks resume this week in Cancun, issues of equity and distributional justice continue to plague many of the proposals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One proposed mechanism which has garnered significant attention over the past year is REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). At its most basic level the idea of REDD, first proposed by a group of developing countries, is for richer countries to pay poor countries to help them preserve their forests. Yet despite some attention to the regulatory pitfalls of REDD there has been little critical attention paid to the potential impact of REDD on indigenous populations - already among the populations most vulnerable to climate change.

The political appeal of the original REDD proposal is clear. An estimated 15-20% of greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to deforestation not including the concurrent loss of the forest as a "carbon sink" for future emissions. Developing countries are in dire need of assistance in adapting to the impacts of climate change. Forests are environmentally valuable not only in the climate change context but also as hot spots of biodiversity.

Yet while the basic REDD proposal presents a viable solution to deforestation, the law of unintended consequences often seems to govern, most prominently when local communities are not included in the design and implementation of projects related to their lands. A recent historical example is the disastrous impact that the establishment of protected areas had on many indigenous communities.

This guest post is the second in a two part series from Nikki Reisch, a second year law student at New York University School of Law, who recently completed a legal internship in ERI's Washington DC office. The first part, published on Tuesday, was "Extractive Industries Transparency and Human Rights: Why Opening the Books is Just the Beginning of the Story."

In the last twelve months, we’ve seen a spate of new initiatives aimed at mandating revenue and contract transparency in the extractive industries. The trend is encouraging, and reflects the culmination of years of campaigning on the part of coalitions like Publish What You Pay (PWYP), of which ERI is an active member. PWYP has long argued that voluntary reporting of payments, through industry-backed programs like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, is not enough; many of the countries with the worst resource-related problems like Burma and Sudan simply refuse to participate. In order to capture all companies, in all countries, reporting requirements must be compulsory and widespread. In July of this year, the U.S. Congress took a step in that direction by passing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act which includes an Energy Security Through Transparency (ESTT) provision requiring oil, gas and mining companies listed with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to disclose information about payments they make to foreign governments for the extraction of resources.

This guest post is the first in a two part series from Nikki Reisch, a second year law student at New York University School of Law, who recently completed a legal internship in ERI's Washington DC office. Part two is "Taking Stock of Extractive Industry Transparency Trends."

Have you ever wondered why there’s so much fuss about transparency in the oil, gas and mining sectors, and why a human rights and environmental organization like ERI cares about the money that flows from extractive industries? As we applaud the significant strides accomplished by transparency advocates this year, it’s useful to recall why opening the books is so important, and why disclosure alone will never be enough to prevent the abuses, conflict, and inequalities that are frequently associated with oil, gas and mineral extraction.

Protection of the Mekong River has been an important part of ERI’s work for several years now, especially through the EarthRights School Mekong and the Mekong Legal Network (MLN).  Recently, I’ve been looking at the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the proposed Xayaburi Hydropower Project in northwestern Laos, the first of the 11 proposed dam projects in the lower Mekong basin—and what it says about prospects for protecting the Mekong.

First, some background.  The Mekong River is integral to the lives of over 25 million people who live along its corridor in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.  Up to $1.5 billion dollars of fish are harvested from its southern waters annually, and more than one million people rely significantly or completely on this protein as a source of nutrition.  The river is also a major source of sediment for the fertile fields of the Mekong delta, a means of navigation for thousands of locals, traders, industries and tourists, and is the home of over 1,000 species of fish and other aquatic life, including the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin and the Giant Mekong Catfish.  It is the lifeblood of much of Southeast Asia.

As the Mekong River Commission (MRC) now meets with select “stakeholders” in Vientiane, Laos to discuss the ongoing development of large-scale hydropower projects on the Mekong, the livelihoods of the millions of stakeholders across the region, those who remain most vulnerable to the decisions now being made, lie in the balance.  This meeting is part of a process officially begun in 1995 at the signing of the Mekong Agreement, and now being led by representatives of the aforementioned countries who make up the MRC.  It is a process founded on noble principles: the recognition of the importance of a healthy and vibrant Mekong ecosystem; respect for the unique interests each country has in the sustainable development of Mekong resources; the need for practical and effective implementation of agreed-upon policies; and cooperation towards the realization of these goals.  However, 15 years on, the MRC and the countries it represents are at risk of compromising these principles, and allowing medium-term profit to cloak what will likely be long-term disaster.