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Global Witness exposes the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and international trade systems, to drive campaigns that end impunity, resource-linked conflict, and human rights and environmental abuses.
Global Witness undertakes investigative research, publishes reports and conducts advocacy campaigns exposing the unaccountable exploitation of natural resources as a driver of human suffering. We make sure that our reports are considered by governments, intergovernmental organisations, civil society and the media and we use them to form the basis of sustained campaigns for change. Over the last 14 years Global Witness has changed the way the world thinks about the extraction and trading of natural resources. Policies and concepts we have formulated now form the basis of rafts of international policy.
A high proportion of countries with large endowments of minerals, timber or oil endure authoritarian rule, are disproportionately corrupt, and have large sectors of their population living in abject poverty despite their country's natural wealth. Throughout the world, earnings from oil, diamonds and other resources are being stashed away in the foreign bank accounts of corrupt government officials. In 2004 Global Witness obtained IMF documents showing that over 1 and a half billion dollars worth of oil money was going missing from the Angolan treasury each year. This is money that could pay for treatment for every HIV positive person in the country. Furthermore, countries with an abundance of natural resources are many times more likely to experience civil war than those that do not possess such easily exploitable riches. Wars, after all, need money. In many cases natural resources have played a prominent role in providing this money, which is used to fund armies and militias who murder, rape and commit other human rights abuses against civilians.
Global Witness wants the global system for trading in natural resources to be completely overhauled and regulated. If corrupt leaders and rebel armies are unable to sell the natural resources they plunder, they are unable to pay for war. If companies extracting natural resources make public what they pay to host governments, then ordinary citizens will no longer be helpless to hold their governments to account over what happens to that money. If banks’ capacity to handle stolen natural resource revenues is impeded, then corrupt leaders will have nowhere to stash their loot.
Global Witness was the first organisation that sought to break the links between the exploitation of natural resources, and conflict and corruption. The results of our investigations and our powerful lobbying skills have been not only a catalyst, but a main driver behind most of the major international mechanisms and initiatives that have been established to address these issues; including the Kimberley Process Kimberley Process and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) .
Global Witness is largely responsible for natural resources occupying the prominent role in the international agenda that they currently do.
Our Conflict Diamonds’ campaign, launched in 1998, exposed how diamonds were fuelling violent conflict across Africa. Our pioneering investigations and campaigning on this issue put the diamond industry, previously shrouded in secrecy, into the international spotlight and compelled the international community to take action to address the trade in conflict diamonds.
In 2003 the Kimberley Process was established as an intergovernmental scheme to regulate the diamond trade. Under the scheme participant countries which export rough diamonds commit to issuing certificates stating that each batch of stones is conflict-free and countries which import diamonds agree not to accept rough diamonds without certification. Since its inception, Global Witness has played a prominent role in shaping the development of the Kimberley Process. Despite its many successes we have identified some major weaknesses which are hindering its ability to eliminate once and for all the potential for diamonds to fund war. Read Here! Recently we acted as informal consultant throughout the making of the film Blood Diamond
Buying a diamond ring? Read this! or visit blooddiamondaction.org
In the field of oil and gas, Global Witness co-founded the Publish What You Pay coalition, which aims to help citizens of resource-rich developing countries hold their governments accountable for the management of revenues from the oil, gas and mining industries. This led directly to the creation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a multi-stakeholder process to deliver revenue transparency.
In addition to ongoing work to shape international initiatives such as the above we undertake investigations which systematically exposes those individuals and business entities responsible for natural resource linked corruption and violent conflict.Global Witness last year reported how the then-President of Turkmenistan kept the money created by the country’s gas industry under his control away from public scrutiny in Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.
Read here!
We also instigated an investigation into arms dealer and timber trader Gus Kouwenhoven, who in 2006 was found guilty of breaking a UN arms embargo and sentenced to eight years in prison. Throughout Charles Taylor’s reign of terror in Liberia, Kouwenhoven’s traded guns for timber rights, smuggling weapons into Liberia (and arranging their transfer to Sierra Leone where they were used by militias loyal to Taylor to commit atrocities against civilians) and shipping out tonnes of tropical hardwoods. At the height of Liberia’s civil war, which caused the deaths of close to 10% of the population, Kouwenhoven’s company was the largest single foreign investor in Liberia.
In 2004, Global Witness highlighted many cases from around the world (including Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Kazakhstan) where the ruling elites consolidate their power from revenues from the oil industry while the people slide into ever deeper levels of poverty. Read here!
Most recently, we have testified at a hearing by the UK Parliamentary International Development Committee regarding the activities of Afrimex, a British company which traded in coltan and cassiterite in eastern DRC throughout the conflict and made payments to the rebel group which controlled those territories – thus contributing to the continuing conflict. The hearing was televised and received widespread coverage. We have also published a new, groundbreaking report exposing how US$118 million from the cocoa trade has funded both sides of the recent armed conflict in Côte d'Ivoire. read here!
To address how logging has fuelled war, propped up oppressive regimes and utterly thwarted chances for equitable development, Global Witness’ has undertaken investigations and campaigns which have resulted in stopping the timber exports that were financing the war efforts of both sides in the Cambodian civil war, the imposition of sanctions on exports of Liberian timber (depriving Charles Taylor's despotic regime of vital revenue) and the closure of the Chinese/Burmese border to illegal and unsustainable timber trafficking in 2006. Most recently, Global Witness has exposed how Cambodia's leaders are treating the country's forests as a personal slush fund Read here! The environmental, social and economic costs of this are severe. Today, Cambodia's forests are under threat of complete destruction.
Despite the great strides made in the first fourteen years of Global Witness' existence, the struggle to ensure that natural resource exploitation is equitable and sustainable is still in its early stages. Resource-fuelled wars such as those that shattered the DRC, Liberia, Angola and Cambodia could happen again tomorrow, and add to a death toll that has topped over six million since the late 1990's, because the international community has not addressed the trade in conflict resources.
The competition between the old and emerging powers to secure the world's remaining oil reserves is escalating, perhaps dangerously so. The scramble by extractive industries to secure exploitation rights over the world's mineral wealth, whilst at the same time resisting any kind of regulation that would enforce good practice, threatens some of the planet's poorest populations, whilst the world's dwindling forests, home to millions of people and reservoirs of biodiversity, continue to face an onslaught by some of the most corrupt regimes and companies, bent on satisfying an insatiable demand for timber regardless of cost.
Natural resources could be the key to ending Africa's poverty, and making it, and other areas of the developing world, the economic powerhouses they should be. But Global Witness believes that neither governments nor industry have shown the leadership or the vision to create the sea change in the international architecture that is necessary to make natural resources a benefit and not a curse. Global Witness believes that this sea change is possible, and it is for this reason that we are continuing to deploy the accumulated thinking, experience and skill that we have developed over the past decade, to help bring about this change. There is no alternative.
And away from the policy arena, Global Witness' hard-hitting investigations have had direct and major impacts, such as the IMF withdrawal from Cambodia in 1996 over corruption in the logging industry, the imposition of timber sanctions on Charles Taylor's Liberia in 2003, and the precedent-setting arrest and conviction of arms trafficker and timber baron Gus Kouwenhoven, in the Netherlands in 2006.
