Blog de Guest

Several months ago, we learned that the ruler of Equatorial Guinea, Obiang Nguema Mbasogo had donated millions of dollars to the United Nations cultural arm, UNESCO, to fund a prize in honor of . . . .himself. A gracious gesture for a man who rules one of the world’s poorest, most corrupt, and resource-rich countries. Could the millions he offered to donate be better used to fund poverty alleviation or education in Equatorial Guinea (EG)? How about the billions of dollars his government receives annually from oil sales? And should the UN’s cultural division honor this autocrat with a prize in his name? What message does that send to those working for good governance, human rights, and sustainable development?

After much lobbying and public outcry, the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced in June that they were delaying the UNESCO-Obiang Nguema Mbasogo International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences in order to allow for additional consultation. It is now becoming clear that UNESCO will decide in October whether to cancel the prize.

Today, over 90 organizations, including EarthRights Internation, wrote to UNESCO to urge its Executive Board members to permanently cancel the Obiang Prize. This letter continues a campaign by NGOs, civil society organizations, academics, Nobel Prize winners, and government officials who are protesting the award and have called for its cancellation.

The people of EG live in dire poverty while Obiang and his cohorts live a life of luxury. While the GDP for the nation has climbed dramatically since oil was discovered in the mid-1990s and its wealth per capita is now $30,000, these numbers grossly misrepresent the country, as the majority of citizens live on less than a dollar a day. Instead of the oil revenues benefiting the citizens of EG, the money is spent on the luxurious lifestyles of Obiang and his family and friends.

Last Thursday evening, I received an exciting and unexpected phone call.  “Did you hear?  Today the UN General Assembly adopted a Resolution that recognizes access to water and sanitation as a fundamental human right!!!  And not just any water—clean, safe, accessible and affordable drinking water!”  The voice belonged to Barbara Olshansky, my human rights law school professor who had spent much of the past year explaining to my classmates and I how the formal recognition of water as a human right, at the international and domestic level, would be an effective means of granting people greater access to water. 

Professor Olshansky, my classmates and I recently travelled to Namibia, where we had the opportunity to meet some of the world’s experts on water access.  I wondered what the news would mean to them; they were not at the UN meeting. In fact, they are probably still waiting in the line where we met.

That's right, the true experts on the significance and meaning of the human right to access water are those who have been denied it.  They are the men, women, and children who must wait in long lines, every day, just to get the water they need to survive. In most of the informal settlements across Namibia, water is only available at prepaid water control points, and people must have a prepaid water card with sufficient water credits just to fill a water bottle.  They carry containers of all different sizes, but the largest appeared to hold a maximum volume of 20 liters—an amount that would have to supply an entire household’s water supply, for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing.

Namibian children wait in line at a water meter

A few weeks ago I was shocked to learn that the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KP), an international body that oversees the trade of diamonds, had reported that Zimbabwe had met the minimum conditions required to lift the ban on the export of its diamonds. The report recommended that Zimbabwe be allowed to resume diamond exports from the controversial Marange area.  “We must move quickly to include Zimbabwe’s rough diamonds in the legitimate diamond pipeline because they are legitimate” said Moti Ganz, the president of the International Diamond Manufacturers Association, at the World Diamond Congress in St Petersburg.

KP monitor, Abby Chikane, issued this recommendation despite having witnessed serious human rights abuses and rampant smuggling during his own investigation of the Marange diamond field. If anything, this is a cruel reminder of the ease with which commercial interests trump human rights – particularly in the extractive industries. Notwithstanding,  several human rights organizations have found the report disturbing and have since exerted pressure on the KP to conduct an independent investigation into the credibility of Chikane’s report. Last month, Human Rights Watch issued Deliberate Chaos: Ongoing Human Rights Abuses in the Marange Diamond Fields of Zimbabwe, documenting the rampant killings, forced labor, torture and harassments taking place at the Marange field. According to the report, Zimbabwe's armed forces still control most of the fields.  Corruption is rife, and smuggling of Marange diamonds by soldiers in the field is prolific. The diamonds continue to benefit a few senior people in the government and their accomplices rather than the people of Zimbabwe as a whole.

Last week, I took a short 20 minute walk from ERI's offices to visit Radio Free Asia (RFA) where, together with other like-minded people, I travelled down the Mekong River, from the source to the mouth, learning about the manifold cultures living alongs its banks. Several of the 26 video clips filmed by RFA Mekong Team travelling from the source to the end of the river were screened and panels, including the team members, shared comments and thoughts on a range of issues related to the river with the audience. 

The opening clip – the source of the Mekong – presented the unspoiled beauty of the Tibetan Plateau and the local nomadic lifestyle. Watching this gorgeous footage awakened memories of my own trip to the Mongolian Plateau in 2006, and made me desperately want to return. No doubt RFA's video team feel the same way watching their own film – longing to leave all worries behind and enjoy a cup of Tibetan salty tea under a black tent. 

Tibetan nomads living relatively close to the source view the Zachu - the local name for the Mekong river - as sacred and find spiritual support rather than seeking practical benefit from it, for example, by fishing. With the Tibetan practice of river burial of babies, the nomad does not eat what comes out of the water. They are content with their life: grass for grazing animals, food to eat, yaks to milk, and their monastery of monks. Claiming that overgrazing is threatening the source of China’s three major rivers, the Chinese government resettles the nomad in new towns with concrete fences, which keeps them confined and isolates them from traditional employment or economic activity. Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to make Tibetan religious and living culture conform to China’s, ordinary Tibetans and pilgrims living with Zachu keep their life from being touched by history.

International law has developed rapidly in recent decades to accommodate the demands of emerging markets, resulting in an unprecedented emergence of specialized regimes such as ‘investment law’, ‘human rights law’, and ‘environmental law’ with no clear mandate in the international law framework as to how to deal with the overlap between rules and institutions within these regimes. 

The international legal framework for transnational investment activities continues to expand.  There are thousands of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) in force, the purported purpose of which was to increase foreign investment by providing foreign investors procedural and substantive rights that protect them from activities of the host government, such as expropriation without adequate compensation, guarantees of fair and equitable treatment, and non-discrimination.  Yet international investment law remains silent on human rights and the ‘investment law’ regime does not provide any mechanism to protect the individuals and communities whose human rights may be implicated by corporate activities and direct foreign investment.

This is no surprise to Argentina.  The Argentine Government has faced numerous foreign investor claims that the country’s various emergency measures and public interest reforms adopted in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis devalued foreign investments in the formerly State-owned public utility sectors, such as water, sewage, and energy.  Almost all of the claims filed against Argentina are before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the international arbitration arm of the World Bank.  At one point, claims against Argentina comprised over 40 percent of ICSID’s docket. 

ERI is pleased to present two guest perspectives on recent reports of mineral wealth in Afghanistan from our legal interns.  Both address how valuable minerals might affect the conflict in Afghanistan, and whether it might lead to the “resource curse” scenario seen in other resource-rich developing countries.

The post below is from DOng Keun Lee, a second-year law student at Washington University in St. Louis. The companion post is from Michelle Salomon, a second-year law student at the University of Maryland.

While the Times Square bomber reminded us of the fact that the US is still under the threat of terrorist attack, we are weary of the unrelenting bad news from the principal theater of the war on terror and thirst for signs of a better future in Afghanistan.  The release of a report on previously unknown mineral deposits - including huge veins of iron, copper and lithium – was timely and could point to a turning point for Afghanistan.  Yet we do not have to look far to see the dark side of natural resource wealth.  Before getting to the main point, I begin by touching on the issue of the interdependence between the stabilization of Afghanistan and the security of the US. 

Two systems of values encompassing a range of global issues permeate the discussion over terrorism: security and development.  Developed countries, which have by and large attained freedom from want, push forward counter-terrorism measures and mechanisms not only because they have primary responsibility for the maintenance of international security under the Charter of the U.N., but also because they have the ability to prioritize national security over development.  By contrast, developing countries, which are often trapped in cycles of poverty, struggle to bring to the table such agendas as foreign aid and debt relief.

ERI is pleased to present two guest perspectives on recent reports of mineral wealth in Afghanistan from our legal interns.  Both address how valuable minerals might affect the conflict in Afghanistan, and whether it might lead to the “resource curse” scenario seen in other resource-rich developing countries.

The post below is from Michelle Salomon, a second-year law student at the University of Maryland. The companion post is from DOng Keun Lee, a second-year law student at Washington University in St. Louis.

The article that appeared on the front page of last week’s New York Times could have caused any under-caffeinated commuter a couple blissful moments of hope: U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan.  After a quick read, I oscillated between feelings of discomfort and relief over the prospect that $1 trillion in untapped minerals—iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium to name a few—were discovered overnight in a country in dire need of an alternative to foreign aid and a means to rectify the impoverishing effects of protracted war.

My worries centered on the possibility of a “natural resource curse” scenario.  Richard Auty coined this term to refer to the paradox of the extreme poverty prevalent in so many countries with abundant natural resources.  Some empirical research on the phenomenon suggests that resource-wealthy countries are at a higher risk for civil war and slower growth than their resource-poor counterparts. Commenting on the recent news in Afghanistan, Keith Slack of Oxfam noted how mineral wealth often triggers a host of other devastating circumstances, such as corruption, human rights violations, worsened conditions of poverty, trauma, and conflict.

Several like-minded NGOs met at the EarthRights School Mekong last week to discuss ways of mitigating potential harms from an economic venture between Burma’s oppressive military regime, the government of India, and others who are developing a project that threatens to create negative environmental and human rights issues for tens of thousands of people in Burma. As a new student intern with ERI, even I could recognize that this was only a new chapter in the longer story of harmful investments that exploit the natural richness of a land populated by many diverse ethnic groups.

The project, called "The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project," is designed to bring greater trade access to north-eastern India by connecting the remote area to a newly improved seaport in the city of Sittwe in western Burma. There is a concern that this greater access will be delivered at the expense of 225km of the wild Kaladan river, and the human rights of its inhabitants. The river will have to be dredged to support barges which will run goods from the port to a new 120 km highway that will cut through Chin State of Burma and run to the Indian border at Mizoram State. The already marginalized people who happen to live in the vicinity will most likely be subject to forced labor, land confiscations, and other abuses by the Burmese Army, impacts commonly associated with the ruling generals’ brand of development. The project will require up to three years to complete, and was originally set to begin in mid 2010.