Blog de Paul Donowitz

I'm leaving this morning for an exciting week in Houston, Texas, where community leaders and watchdog groups from around the world will expose and confront the oil giant Chevron, at its own shareholder meeting, on its global record of environmental harms and human suffering. Activities were kicked off last week by The True Cost of Chevron network, with the launch of the second annual The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report. ERI is proud to be part of this powerful and emerging civil society coalition, and we look forward to challenging the company on key issues this week.

I will be joined in Houston by Naing Htoo, our Program Coordinator in Asia, and Lindsey Ingraham, an ERI intern and recent George Washington Law School graduate, and we will be taking part in a number of activities throughout the week, highlighted by a trip inside the Chevron annual meeting to speak directly to the company's CEO and Board of Directors on the harms they continue to cause. We will also be holding public events in Houston to expose the true cost of Chevron's operations on the communities where it operates, including press conferences and a panel discussion. Later in the week, the coalition will keep the momentum going by coming together for a strategy retreat to drive this important movement forward.

We'll be blogging from Houston throughout the week, so please check back for more updates!

This week, Transparency International released its 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), a "composite index … based on 13 different expert and business surveys" that measures not corruption itself, "but the perceived level of public-sector corruption."

Burma (Myanmar), a perennial bottom-feeder since it was added to the CPI in 2003, this year came in 178th of 180 countries, besting only Afghanistan and Somalia, and scored a mere 1.4 out of 10 possible points.  

Nigeria, site of the tragic events behind the Wiwa v Shell case, which ended this year in a historic settlement, slipped from 121st to 130th after several years of improvement, but avoided reuniting with Burma at the bottom, where it spent the first half of the decade. However, Nigeria scored only 2.5 points of a possible 10, so its recent climb is hardly cause for celebration.

While the CPI does not disclose the precise numbers leading to each country's score, Transparency International's Huguette Labelle has counted the lack of "transparency in public budgets, revenue and aid flows" among the many factors contributing to corruption across the globe. Promotion of transparency is a common theme in many of EarthRights International's campaigns as well.

In our September 2009 report "Total Impact: The Human Rights, Environmental, and Financial Impacts of Total and Chevron’s Yadana Gas Project in Military-Ruled Burma (Myanmar)," ERI revealed how the Yadana gas pipeline has generated over US$7 billion, with a majority of these billions going to the Burmese military regime. We also reported that a significant portion of these revenues never make it back into Burma, but instead can be found squired away in non-government bank accounts in Singapore.