Campaign on disclosure of overseas corporate activities

by Danielle Knight

Washington, 13 Feb 2001 (IPS) -- In an attempt to hold US corporations accountable for their behaviour overseas, a coalition of environment, labour and human rights groups are urging lawmakers here to require companies to disclose details about their operations abroad.

US law already requires companies to disclose some basic information about their domestic activities, including what kind of pollution they emit or how many employees have been injured on the job.

The coalition is currently circulating a proposal that urges members of Congress to draft new legislation that would extend these existing requirements to companies’ overseas operations.

“Communities and workers throughout the world have the right to important information about corporate practices that will have significant impacts on their lives,” says a statement by the coalition of more than 150 organisations including Amnesty International, the AFL-CIO (which is the largest US federation of labour unions), and Friends of the Earth.

The lobbying effort, known as the International Right to Know Campaign, differs from other attempts to keep multinational companies in check, or the UN’s Global Compact under which corporations are to sign up to (but with no monitoring mechanism) to abide by environment, human rights and social standards

“It is not a corporate code of conduct and does not imply that a company is guilty of human rights violations or polluting the environment,” says David Waskow, trade and investment policy coordinator for Friends of the Earth here.

An international right to know will simply empower local communities “by giving them direct access to critical information they need,” he says. The campaign, he explains, grew out of concern that values such as environmental protection and labour rights are taking a back seat to financial interests and global trade.

“Our concern is that free trade may not always result in positive change,” says Waskow.

He cites such examples as Newmont Mining Corporation’s activities in Indonesia, which local environmental groups say are polluting important water resources.

Indonesian organisations claim that mine tailings from the Denver-based company’s open-pit copper and gold mine on the island of Sumbawa resulted in declining fish populations and hurt local fishing communities.

If the mine were in the United States, it would be required under the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act to disclose what chemicals in the mining waste were discharged, says Waskow. Under the International-Right-to- Know proposal, Newmont would have to report this information no matter where in the world it was operating.

Waskow says the 1986 domestic Right-to-Know law has caused businesses to voluntarily improve their practices.

“Industries have reduced their toxic releases by almost half since the programme began,” he says, implying that the same could be true if the law is extended to corporate activities in other countries.

Folabi Olagbaju, director of Amnesty International’s human rights and environment programme, says that the new proposal would also require US companies operating abroad to disclose the existence of security arrangements with state police and military forces or with third-party military or paramilitary forces.

Rights organisations are concerned, he says, that in some cases such arrangements have led to human rights abuses.

In Nigeria, for example, the US-based Chevron corporation reportedly allowed its helicopters to be used by both government security forces and its own private security personnel to attack unarmed protesters who took over one of the company’s oil drilling platforms. The attack, says Olagbaju, resulted in two fatalities and 30 wounded among the protesters.

“If there were an International Right to Know law, Chevron would have been required to disclose whatever kind of security arrangement it had with the Nigerian government,” he says.

The proposal would also require US companies to disclose if they do or do not have a human rights policy, adds Olagbaju.

“It would also require companies to disclose any human rights lawsuits against them as well as complaints received from local communities,” he says.

The proposal would also call to some existing US disclosure laws involving labour practices to overseas operations, says Elizabeth Drake, international policy analyst with the AFL-CIO.

Currently, US employers are required to submit information to the government on how many workers have been hurt or killed in the United States on the job due to work-related accidents. US companies must also inform their employees and the government if personnel are working with hazardous chemicals or materials.

Drake says that the proposal is also asking lawmakers to require companies to disclose where their foreign operations are located. This information, she says, would give consumers in the United States a better idea of the labour conditions under which a certain product may have been made.

“If you know that the product is made where trade unions are not allowed, then you know a little more about what the situation might be,” says Drake.

The proposal would also require US corporations to post the International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work in every domestic and foreign facility, she says.

“The campaign is not just about getting information to the United States, but also about making sure that workers in foreign countries have basic information about their working conditions and their rights,” says Drake.

Previous attempts to get US corporations to voluntarily disclose information about their plants or operations in other countries have failed, says Paul Orum, director of the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know, an environmental advocacy group based here.

“When non-governmental organisations and governments alike have sought unilateral disclosure of pollutant releases through voluntary reporting initiatives, most companies have refused to provide data,” he says.

In 1992, when Friends of the Earth asked 43 international chemical companies that report pollutant releases under US law to provide equivalent information on their facilities in other countries, only 11 agreed to provide data, says Orum. Even when the government requests such information of US-based companies, they are reluctant to comply, he adds.

In the early 1990s, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the State of California, for example, separately requested pollutant-release data from US-owned facilities that operate across the border in Mexico.

When they received almost no response, the regulatory agency then had to use its authority under a US law on toxic substances to subpoena 95 US companies to submit the information, he says.

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