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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.   

Recently, I watched the new documentary Bajo el Cielo Amazónico (Under the Amazon Sky), which takes a critical look at the social, environmental, and economic impacts of the logging industry in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. The film focuses on Ashaninka communities from along the Tamaya River, and takes issue with many aspects of natural resource extraction on indigenous territories in the Amazon, including:

• The social and environmental impacts of logging and deforestation
• The ‘invisibility’ of indigenous communities without land titles or ID cards.
• Poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth between companies and local communities
• The irrationality of sustainable natural resource extraction
• Unfair labor practices and the withholding of salaries
• Access to education and health care

In approaching these issues, the film strives to raise the voices of local communities affected by logging, mining and oil exploitation by having them tell their own stories, following a similar tradition to Una Muerte en Sión (A Death in Zion) and La Voz de los Apus (The Voice of the Apus).

The concerns about natural resource development on indigenous territories raised in each of these three movies are especially relevant today as the Peruvian Amazon continues to face increasing environmental and social challenges. Within just the last month, the Peruvian government passed Emergency Decrees 001-2011 and 002-2011 which aim to increase foreign investment by eliminating the requirement for environmental impact assessments (EIA) for more than 30 large-scale development projects, including several hydropower dams and transportation and trade corridors.

On Friday I heard from our colleagues at Amazon Watch that a Brazilian federal court had issued an order suspending plans to build the Belo Monte dam, a massive project that is intended to be the third-largest dam in the world and is likely to disrupt critical Amazonian waterways and threaten the survival of indigenous groups.  The judge apparently found that the requirements of environmental law had not been met.

Amazon Watch has been campaigning on the Belo Monte dam for quite some time, and their website has a wealth of information about the project and the campaign to stop it.  Personally I'm pleased to see judges in the Amazon region taking environmental law seriously and not simply bowing to powerful interests, first with the Chevron judgment in Ecuador earlier this month, and now with the latest ruling on the Belo Monte dam.

I was thrilled to hear yesterday that the Cerro de Oro Hydroelectric Project, near Oaxaca, Mexico, has been temporarily suspended while its financier, Conduit Capital Partners LLC, addresses complaints about environmental and social impacts and a failure to consult local communities. ERI’s colleagues at the California-based organization Accountability Counsel (AC) have been representing the Cerro de Oro indigenous communities and assisting them to make their voices heard by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) – the US federal agency whose investment enabled Conduit to finance the project – and the Oaxacan State Government.

Accountability Counsel specializes in using the accountability mechanisms of international financial institutions and other dispute resolution forums to assist communities facing environmental harms arising out of development projects. According to AC, the Cerro de Oro project is likely to have devastating effects on surrounding communities, including the destruction of water sources and fishing grounds and the contamination of agricultural land. The communities have not been given information about the progress of the dam, and the only environmental impact assessment that has been conducted overlooked major aspects of the dam’s consequences.

It’s instructive to see how the communities attained this rare victory. After attempts to negotiate directly with the company broke down, AC assisted them to file a complaint with OPIC’s Office of Accountability, which provides “problem-solving” services to communities experiencing the adverse effects of OPIC-funded projects. While substantial assistance from OPIC has not yet been forthcoming, the information contained in the communities’ complaint formed the basis of a campaign that led the Congress of Oaxaca State to unanimously decide to investigate the project and host public hearings on their findings. Evidently the potential exposure and mounting pressure was enough to convince Conduit that it should at least consider the consequences before barging ahead with construction that could irreparably harm indigenous groups and destroy their traditional ways of life.

The EarthRights School Mekong (ERSM) brings together students from China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam to learn about the impacts of large-scale infrastructure and commercial development projects in the Mekong region and local struggles to address the negative effects of such projects. Before the 2010 ERSM students celebrated their graduation, they took a final field trip, where they visited three communities that have fought against destructive commercial development projects.

The students visited Klong Dan and Ma Ta Phut and learned about the two communities' successful efforts to obtain investigations into project impacts. In Klong Dan, local residents fought the construction of an industrial waste water treatment plant that had commenced without local participation or environmental, social and economic impact assessments. The residents collected information and wrote a letter that prompted the Asian Development Bank to conduct its first-ever site inspection and, later, to halt funding for the project. Similarly, residents near the Ma Ta Phut industrial zone temporarily halted 76 projects in the zone after a Thai court ruled in their favor and found that developers had failed to undertake required health and environmental assessments.

As the community movement they want to safe their livelihood and environment. . . . The local people and the authority had different idealism and the local people dared to refuse the authority power as they mentioned the constitution and some protection environmental laws to support their rights. - Thai student

Students also visited Bornok-Hin Krud, located on the east coast of Thailand, where local people have been fighting the Thai government's plan to build a coal-fired power plant. In 2004, Charoen Watakson, a core leader of the villagers' protest, was murdered. The ERSM students visited his memorial and learned about the villagers' ongoing struggle.

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

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.

A quick update on major developments in the case against Chevron in Ecuador: the Superior Court of Nueva Loja in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, issued its final judgment yesterday in the case of Maria Aquinda v Chevron, finding Chevron responsible for soil and water contamination and ordering it to pay more than $8 billion dollars for health impacts and environmental cleanup. Chevron has said it will appeal the decision. Chevron contests liability and obtained orders last week temporarily forbidding the plaintiffs from attempting to enforce the judgment while a New York federal court considers the company’s allegations of fraud.

This has been a historic month for Sudan and Burma, two countries with significant and controversial investment from China in their petroleum sectors. In the past, many parallels have been drawn between Sudan and Burma as both countries are culturally diverse, rich in fossil fuels, and share similar histories including a colonial legacy, decades of armed conflict and civil war, widespread human rights abuses, and economic sanctions imposed by the West. However, with recent national elections in Burma and the independence referendum in South Sudan, both countries are entering new phases of political transition, which raises questions about the future and security of China’s investments in oil, natural gas, and pipeline projects in Sudan and Burma.

In South Sudan, the result of last month’s referendum was officially announced last week, with an overwhelming 98% of the population voting for independence from the north. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has publicly accepted the result of the referendum, but many questions remain unanswered about the future of Sudan and South Sudan’s vast oil reserves; how oil revenues will be divided, and the operation of the Greater Nile Oil Pipeline, which spans 1,600 km from oilfields in the south to Port Sudan in the north. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) operates the pipeline and has significant investments in South Sudan’s oilfields, but all the contracts have been negotiated with the government in the northern capital of Khartoum. Prior to the referendum, representatives of the semi-autonomous government of South Sudan called for a renegotiation of all oil contracts, but just a few weeks ago southern oil minister Garang Diing announced that South Sudan “will respect all our contracts signed before the (2005) peace agreement.” Still, CNPC signed several agreements after 2005 and the uncertainty about these investments in South Sudan has led the Chinese government and CNPC to launch a charm offensive to keep the oil flowing.

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.

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

Chevron's going all-out in its lawsuit against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs and their lawyers who've sued Chevron over environmental devastation in the Amazon.  The company wasted no time in asking for a temporary restraining order (TRO) and preliminary injunction preventing the plaintiffs and their lawyers from enforcing an Ecuadorian judgment or attaching Chevron's assets.

Today, Judge Kaplan, the federal judge presiding over the case, granted a 14-day TRO and an expedited schedule for a hearing about a preliminary injunction.  This was no surprise; last week Judge Kaplan issued an "order to show cause" (OSC) which basically said that Chevron had made a good case for a TRO and the Ecuadorians needed to prove why it should not issue.

It's not clear, though, how Chevron's made an adequate showing as to why it needs these emergency orders.  The Ecuadorian court has not issued any kind of judgment against Chevron, and it's not clear when such a judgment will be issued.  As far as I know, the plaintiffs have not tried to attach any of Chevron's assets.

Under Rule 65 of the federal rules, the judge is only supposed to issue a TRO if Chevron is facing "immediate and irreparable injury, loss, or damage."  It's highly questionable whether Chevron's actually met this standard.

Furthermore, Chevron's supposed to pay "security" to the court--such as a bond--that would be sufficient to cover the plaintiffs' losses if it turns out the TRO was issued improperly.  So far I haven't seen any indication that Judge Kaplan is going to require this.

Nor is it even clear what the legal impact of Judge Kaplan's ruling is.  The TRO rules don't give the court jurisdiction over anyone that it wouldn't otherwise have.  So it doesn't answer questions about why the Ecuadorians, or most of their lawyers, would be subject to the jurisdiction of a New York federal court.  Almost none of the people that Chevron has sued have actually showed up in Kaplan's court yet, which could be a strategy to fight the court's jurisdiction.