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Latest Developments, April 9

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Cluster bomb blacklist
The Guardian reports that in an “unpublicised but co-ordinated move,” four major UK banks and insurance companies have blacklisted corporations that manufacture cluster munitions and landmines.
“The Guardian has learned that major firms such as Lloyds Banking Group (through its investment arm Scottish Widows), Aviva, the UK’s largest insurer, and the Co-op have imposed a blanket ban on holding shares in companies that make or supply cluster munitions, purging them from nearly all their share portfolios.
Royal Bank of Scotland has banned all new lending to the same companies, and is now reviewing its defence industry shareholdings. Similar action is being taken by all the firms to clear out shares in anti-personnel landmine manufacturers, following intense pressure from human rights campaigners.
The industry is operating two parallel ‘stop lists’, which cover a dozen arms companies involved in making or supplying cluster bombs and anti-personnel landmines, including the US defence companies Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and the South Korean industrial conglomerate Doosan.”

Bloody F1
Reuters reports on the “increasingly loud calls” for cancellation of the Formula One race scheduled later this month in Bahrain, whose regime continues to face regular protests.
“The governing International Automobile Federation FIA.L, commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone and Bahrain organisers have all said the April 22 race is on.
…
FIA president Jean Todt is expected to be in China, as is Ecclestone, and there are likely to be a number of meetings in the Shanghai paddock – possibly up until as late as Sunday morning.
‘Friday has been the busiest day for protests in Bahrain so Saturday looks the most likely day for any emergency meeting (in Shanghai),’ commented one team member.
Last year’s Bahrain Grand Prix was repeatedly re-scheduled and then reluctantly cancelled by organisers due to the violence in the country.”

Unfair policy
Al Jazeera reports that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has complained to her American counterpart about the impacts of US monetary policy on the world’s poor.
“Rousseff said low interest rates and other expansionist policies in wealthy nations have created an excess of global liquidity, which in turn has the unintended effect of damaging growth in poorer countries such as Brazil.
She also raised concerns with Obama that sanctions against Iran could fuel tensions in the Middle East and cause a spike in oil prices, threatening the global economic recovery, sources told Reuters news agency on condition of anonymity.”

Hostile environment
The Arizona Daily Star reports on new efforts to find and identify the bodies of migrants who die in Arizona’s desert.
“According to the Pima County Forensic Science Center, in 2011 there were 117 unidentified migrants who died in the Southern Arizona desert.
…
‘After a while, I started thinking: “Why do we have to just wait for the bodies? Let’s go get them,” ’ [technology liaison for the Office of the Medical Examiner and the Mexican Consulate, Engel] Indo said.
Once or twice a month, Indo plans to take volunteers into the desert on daylong searches for bodies, bones and live people.”

Solidarity tax
Reuters reports that Morocco’s government has decided to implement a “solidarity fund tax” on corporations in order to tackle social inequalities.
“Proceeds from the new tax will help raise 2 billion dirhams ($235 million) for a social solidarity fund to develop poor areas in a country that has one of the widest wealth inequalities in the region and where protesters still take to the streets over poverty, joblessness and corruption.
…
The 2012 budget now provides for the imposition in 2012 of a tax equal to 1.5 percent of the net profit for firms that make between 50 million and 100 million dirhams in net annual gains, Finance Ministry and parliament officials said.
Firms with annual net profits above 100 million dirhams will be subject to a 2.5 percent tax on their net profit in 2012, they added.”

Construction problems
A Libyan activist writing under the pen name Layla Ibrahim takes issue with the international community’s approach to rebuilding her country.
“The EU is responsible for media and communications training, yet that is still to start. The company, IMG international, hired to do this, is still in the needs assessment phase, for which they require a couple of months. However even when it does start, none of the ‘experts’ are Arabic speakers, which means it is unlikely they’ll be able to help shape the scripts or articles to support our journalists.
…
As one diplomat said: ‘The EU just about works within the EU; it has no business operating outside. The interests of one European country in Libya are not going to be the same as another, so Libya will suffer from these conflicts of interests as they fight over the same pot.’
In the meantime, Libyan professionals who are desperate to help rebuild their country are being side-lined. Internationals will hire Libyans in the main as fixers/drivers/translators but not in key positions. They will pay vast sums for hotel bills and per diems but will quibble over dinars to hire local staff.”

Ashley Judd’s face
Actor Ashley Judd analyzes a culture in which enormous media attention is focused on a woman’s face that is perceived to have become “puffy.”
“That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.”

Latest Developments, September 29

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Aid grump
Humanosphere’s Tom Paulson offers a summary of a recent interview with New York University’s Bill Easterly whom he describes as an “aid grump.”
“The historical record is pretty clear that success in development comes from people doing development themselves. Outsiders can help in modest ways, such as in a response to a disaster. But there’s no evidence aid can become the main engine of development to transform the Third World into the First World, poverty to prosperity.”

The evolution of philanthropreneurs
Oxfam’s Duncan Green draws attention to some of the highlights – mainly to do with taxation of the extractive industries, tobacco and transportation, as well as thoughts on how to tap into migrant worker remittances and sovereign wealth funds – of a leaked preview to the report Bill Gates will present to the G20 later this year.
“Does Bill Gates’ protagonism mark a further shift of the big philanthropreneurs (and their foundations) from an insistence on sticking to the relatively straightforward world of ‘stuf’ (vaccines, infrastructure, seeds, microfinance) to the more complex business of influencing systems and policies, which are every bit as crucial to development? Hope so.”

Anti-depression
Another billionaire philanthropist, George Soros, prescribes some measures he believes Europe must undertake in order to avoid triggering “another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences.”
“Three bold steps are needed. First, the governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common treasury for the eurozone. In the meantime, the major banks must be put under the direction of the European Central Bank in exchange for a temporary guarantee and permanent recapitalization. Third, the ECB would enable countries such as Italy and Spain temporarily to refinance their debt at a very low cost.”

Panic tax
The Institute of Development Studies’ Lawrence Haddad suggests the Financial Transactions (or Tobin or Robin Hood) Tax just proposed by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso might not be as effective a tool against market volatility as a “a Panic Tax, the Tobin Tax’s first cousin.”
“The Panic Tax…does not tax the level of financial transactions, but the speed at which they occur.
This gets at Tobin’s original concern directly and deals with the dangers introduced by High Frequency Traders.”

CSR Binarism
The Institute for Human Rights and Business’s John Morrison expresses concern, in a letter to the Financial Times, that British Labour leader Ed Miliband has too simplistic a view of companies as being either good or bad.
“Company structures are value-neutral creations; it is the actions that business takes that have positive or negative impacts. What is needed is an undertaking from current or future UK governments also to intervene when an otherwise acceptable company does a very bad thing – such as the decision by Vodafone to close its Egyptian network at the end of January this year when its customers were most at need.”

Roma evictions
Human Rights Watch has condemned what it describes as “mass evictions and expulsions of Eastern European Roma” by the French government and the apparent indifference of European authorities.
“The European Commission gave France the all-clear, but the situation for Roma in France has only grown worse,” according to Human Rights Watch researcher Judith Sunderland. “It’s vital for the commission to renew its scrutiny of these abusive practices, which breach EU and human rights law.”

Irregular arrivals
Embassy Magazine reports that with Canada’s Conservative government now holding a majority of seats in parliament, the fight against a proposed toughening of the country’s immigration laws looks set to move to the courts, spearheaded by the newly formed Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers.
“The bill defines human smuggling as an offence and sets out tough penalties. But the bill also lets the immigration minister designate an ‘irregular arrival’ of a group of people to Canada, whose members may be arrested without a warrant and detained for at least a year, unless their claim has been resolved or they get special permission from the minister.
Some refugee lawyers have said this clearly violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which, in Section 7 guarantees the right not to be deprived of life, liberty and security of the person except ‘in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.’”

Dangerous schlock
Foreign Policy’s Brett Keller is not a fan of the new film Machine Gun Preacher which he describes as “Hollywood’s latest take on the ‘white man saves Africa’ theme,” possibly a pack of lies and quite probably dangerous.
“But by conflating humanitarian work with Wild West-style vigilantism, Childers makes the world more dangerous for the many aid workers risking their lives to do good in places like South Sudan. The anonymous aid worker who writes the widely read blog Tales from the Hood makes this point: ‘We [aid workers] very often go into insecure places where our presence and the associated suspicion that we may have ulterior motives puts not only us, but our local colleagues and those we’re trying to help at greater risk, too…. Every time [Childers] puts up another video of himself jumping into his white SUV with an AK47 across his lap, he increases the likelihood that I or someone I care about is going to get shot.’”

Latest Developments, September 28

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The new containment
David Eaves, “public policy entrepreneur” and blogger, argues the Open Government Partnership, which officially launched last week, is widely misunderstood as a “do good project” when it is actually motivated by geopolitical considerations.
“The OGP is part of a 21st century containment policy. And I’d go further, it is a effort to forge a new axis around which America specifically, and a broader democratic camp more generally, may seek to organize allies and rally its camp. It abandons the now outdated free-market/democratic vs. state-controlled/communist axis in favour of a more subtle, but more appropriate, open vs. closed.”

Double non-taxation
The European Network on Debt and Development’s Alex Marriage writes about efforts underway in Europe to stem the “race to the bottom” in corporate taxation and the practice of “treaty shopping” which often leads to “double non-taxation.”
“There is a constant stream of double taxation agreements being signed between developing and developed countries which in the current global regulatory environment frequently lead to double non taxation. This amendment will not help developing countries directly but acknowledgement of the problem is surely welcome.”

Co-opting Robin Hood
TheParliament.com reports that European Commission President José Manuel Barroso has announced plans for a Financial Transaction Tax or “Robin Hood tax,” saying it was time for the continent’s banks to give back to society after the trillions in public funds they have received since the financial crisis began.
“The FTT is moving from rhetoric to reality but a significant part of the revenues should be used as Bill Gates suggested, to help poor countries facing chilling reductions in aid, trade, and investment – not just shore up the EU budget,” according to Oxfam’s Nicolas Mombrial.
“An FTT is not a ‘Robin Hood tax’ unless clear commitments are made to use the revenues for tackling climate change, and poverty at home and abroad.”

The poor feeding the rich
Greenpeace has released a new report entitled How Africa is feeding Europe which describes the local impacts of European “fisheries partnership agreements” off the coast of West Africa.
“In European waters, the level of overfishing is higher than the global average, with an estimated 88% of European fish stocks in a poor state. Rather than solve this problem, the EU has progressively been increasing their capacity in seas beyond its own to meet the growing global demand for seafood and to keep their fleets in business. Several of Europe’s largest vessels are currently operating in waters of some of the world’s poorest nations through fisheries partnership agreements or joint ventures, undermining local food security by failing to adequately consider the local communities need for local fish as a source of protein and income.”

Good and bad refugees
Romero House’s Mary Jo Leddy imagines how history will judge Canada’s current treatment of would-be Tamil migrants and criticizes a proposed piece of immigration legislation the Conservative government describes as an effort to stop human smuggling.
“Bill C-4 is another attempt by stealth to prevent refugees from coming to Canada. A series of pieces of legislation have effectively divided refugees into two groups: the “bad” refugees who have the audacity to come to Canada on their own, and the “good” refugees who are in camps overseas and who will stay there until they are among those chosen to come to Canada.”

Absurd orthodoxy
Clarity Economics’s Phil Thornton reports on last month’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings where participants considered the possibility that the dominant economic model of the past few decades has failed.
“According to [Joseph] Stiglitz, the models used by central banks and many in the private sector created a policy framework that was clearly at the centre of the crisis: ‘It said you don’t need regulation. It said all you need for monetary policy is low inflation and that would suffice to ensure stable growth. In retrospect, these ideas seem absurd.’”

3Ds peril
The Guardian reports on the difficulties, including deportations and delayed shipments, faced by foreign aid agencies operating in Pakistan in the aftermath of revelations the CIA had used a fake vaccination scheme in its hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“Others complain of regular visits to their offices from intelligence officials seeking detailed information about their staff. One intelligence document, inadvertently left behind at one aid agency and seen by the Guardian, directs operatives to investigate the ‘covert funding’ and ‘covert operations’ of international NGOs.”

Humanitarian G-spot
On Motherhood and Sanity’s Angelica, guest blogging on Tales from the Hood, suggests the development industry is not walking its gender talk.
“You know I’m right. You just cannot (and certainly should not) have a document, meeting, program or strategy that does not address gender. Depending on the place and theme it can range from anything along the lines of combating FGM to increased political representation and decision making.  As aid practitioners we are acutely aware of the pitfalls and structural biases that leave women vulnerable to abuse and dependency. We ignore the local’s arguments that link these forms of discrimination to culture or tradition, and demand equality be treated as a basic human right.
So why is it we are failing so miserably to achieve gender balance at home?”

Latest Developments, September 21

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The problem with nation states
The Institute of Development Studies’ Lawrence Haddad looks at the lessons the recent and ongoing global crises hold for development thinking on issues such as economic growth, civil society and nation states.
“Several case studies showed how national self interest will continue to undermine collective action that is in the long-term interest of all. From the G8 to the G20 to the G193, issue-specific coalitions of countries (there are 193 states recognised by the UN), and the membership of those coalitions, is probably best explained by national politics. We need to understand these national coalitions more than ever.”

Debt-collection dangers
British House of Lords member Robert Skidelsky sees in the history of interwar Europe an argument for debt forgiveness in the eurozone.
“Germans today would say that, unlike reparations, the Greek and Mediterranean debts were voluntarily incurred, not coerced. This raises the question of justice, but not the economic consequences of insisting on payment. Moreover, there is a fallacy of composition: if there are too many debt collectors, they will impoverish the very people on whom their own prosperity depends.”

The scramble for goals
The Overseas Development Institute’s Claire Melamed argues that simply replacing the Millennium Development Goals with a new set of post-2015 goals would be missing the opportunity to rethink global cooperation and development for a world that has changed substantially since the 1990s.
“The MDGs can be seen as an agreement between donor and recipient countries about a set of priorities for collaboration and a monitoring framework. The goals and targets approach worked well for that.  But the world is different now. Most poor people live in countries that are both donor and recipient, or neither. Why should their governments be interested in a global agreement? What would be in it for them? Something that was all about aid would probably bypass the majority of the poorest people in the world.”

Robbing the rich to give to the bureaucrats?
Oxfam’s Max Lawson writes that the European Financial Transactions Tax, or Robin Hood Tax, now looks like a sure thing but the battle over where the resulting revenue will be channelled is heating up.
“Controversially, the Commission wants to use the FTT to finance the [European Commission] budget, none of the revenue raised would be used for climate change or development. Given the unpopularity of EU bureaucrats, this has won no support from France or Germany. Instead [French] President Sarkozy, in a speech the week after the joint Franco-German announcement [that the two countries would push for a European FTT at November’s G20 summit], again reiterated his belief that the revenue should help fight poverty and climate change.”

EU migrant abuse
Human Rights Watch has released a new report that accuses the EU’s border security agency of contributing to “inhuman and degrading” treatment of migrants.
“Frontex has become a partner in exposing migrants to treatment that it knows is absolutely prohibited under human rights law,” according to the group’s refugee program director, Bill Frelick. “To end this complicity in inhuman treatment, the EU needs to tighten the rules for Frontex operations and make sure that Frontex is held to account if it breaks the rules in Greece or anywhere else.”

Silicosis lawsuit
The BBC reports 450 former South African gold miners are alleging in a UK lawsuit that mining giant Anglo American is responsible for their lung diseases.
“Black miners at South African mines undertook the dustiest jobs, unprotected by respirators or – unlike their white counterparts – with access to on-site showers,” according to the miners’ London lawyers.
“Dust levels were high and they suffered massive rates of silicosis, a known hazard of gold mining for the last century.”

NCD baby steps
University of Toronto political scientist John Kirton says world leaders took “baby steps” towards tackling non-communicable diseases at this week’s UN summit but argues a comprehensive strategy would be good for both the world economy and its people’s health.
“The next opportunity to act comes in early November, at the G20 summit in Cannes. It’s tailor-made to address and advance the prevention and control of NCDs. The G20 summit governs critical interconnected economic, development and health issues through a comprehensive, coherent approach. It must control NCDs and thus soaring health-care costs to meet the commitments made at the 2010 Toronto summit to cut their fiscal deficit in half as a share of GDP by 2013 and to contain the global sovereign debt crisis erupting in Europe, too.”

The G20’s fifteen minutes
The McLeod Group’s John Sinclair asks if an “overconfident” G20, which initially seemed to embody a new era of greater international cooperation, is already in decline.
“It has quickly slipped into the flawed G8 mode of endless technical debate between finance and central bank officials. It has fallen into a quagmire of competing plans for avoiding a repeat banking crisis, with Americans and Europeans squabbling over whose regulations are the best (or rather, the least bad).”

Bad aid in Afghanistan
The International Crisis Group’s Sophie Desroulieres argues that heavily militarized international aid to Afghanistan is in urgent need of a rethink if it is actually going to help the country and its people.
“A decade of investment in security, of development aid and humanitarian assistance – $57 billion spent between 2002 and 2010 over and above the war effort, according to Afghanistan’s finance ministry – has not resulted in a politically stable or economically viable country. State institutions remain fragile, unable to provide good governance. Instead of going through Afghan institutions and reinforcing their legitimacy, 80 percent of aid went around the Afghan state. In 2010, Kabul and donors agreed that at least half of reconstruction and development aid should go though Afghan institutions by 2012. But the loss of credibility, the corruption and the nepotism corroding the regime of President Hamid Karzai have already undermined that agreement.” (Translated from French)

Selective principles in Libya
Embassy Magazine’s Scott Taylor argues NATO seems to have forgotten, or never believed in, the humanitarian values it cited to justify its Libyan intervention.
“Frustrated at their inability to make advances against the city of Bani Walid, former rebel commanders have told reporters they intend to shell the city with heavy artillery. Given the fact that there are still an estimated 75,000 civilians living there, this act would inevitably result in the death of many innocent Libyans. This, of course, is exactly what NATO claims it intended to prevent.”

Latest Developments, August 10

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British Prime Minister David Cameron has attributed the UK’s rioting to “a lack of proper parenting,” but Reuters journalist Mohammed Abbas relates another side of the story: “They were not your typical hoodlums out there. There were working people, angry people. They’ve raised rates, cut child benefit. Everyone just used it as a chance to vent,” one man told him. A Futurismic map of London suggests a link between the locations of the violence and levels of deprivation. The map uses the British government’s latest English Indices of Deprivation, which provide an aggregate of seven variables: income deprivation, employment deprivation, health deprivation and disability, education skills and training deprivation, barriers to housing and services, living environment deprivation, and crime.

The UN says high food prices are making the Horn of Africa crisis worse, with grain and milk prices at record highs across the region. The US has given its support to a movement to impose international sanctions on Eritrea, which is also affected by East Africa’s severe drought, for allegedly attempting to destabilize its neighbours. US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice called the Ethiopian-led effort “timely” but added any sanctions “would not go in any way to harm the people of Eritrea, who are suffering enough as it is.”

The US has also imposed new sanctions on Syria, targeting its largest bank and biggest telecom company. Washington has little direct economic leverage because there are few American companies operating in Syria. It hopes, however, to influence European governments to take measures against the country’s oil and gas sector, a move that does not appear to be imminent. But a “group of social investment firms plans an e-mail campaign to urge 11 oil companies to either stop operations in Syria or communicate their condemnation of the violent crackdown on protesters to the government,” according to Pensions and Investments.

The World Bank has suspended lending to Cambodia over mass evictions of residents to make way for a luxury development on land around a lake in the capital Phnom Penh. “Until an agreement is reached with the residents of Boeung Kak Lake, we do not expect to provide any new lending to Cambodia,” the World Bank’s Annette Dixon said. Evictions have been the source of friction with foreign donors for some time but according to Reuters: “Land ownership is a complex subject in the impoverished Southeast Asian country, where legal documents were destroyed and state institutions collapsed under the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and the civil war that followed.”

In the wake of Libyan accusations that a NATO air strike caused the “massacre” of 85 people earlier this week, Amnesty International is calling on the military alliance to investigate all alleged civilian killings: “NATO continues to stress its commitment to protect civilians,” the human rights group’s Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said in a statement. “To that effect, it should thoroughly investigate this and all other recent incidents in which civilians were reportedly killed in western Libya as a result of air strikes.”

Canadian immigration minister Jason Kenney has struck back hard at Amnesty International for its criticism of his government’s plan to deport 30 men it alleges have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. In addition to writing a scathing open letter of response, he told the Toronto Star the rights group is wrongly using “its voice and scarce resources to focus on criticizing what is probably the fairest immigration system in the world.” Last month, Amnesty had called on the Canadian government to try these individuals rather than deport them. But it was hardly alone in questioning an operation that involved publishing the pictures and names of the alleged criminals on a government website and led some experts to suggest the Canadian government was “conflating immigration and criminal law.” The Canadian Centre for International Justice’s Jayne Stoyles told Embassy Magazine: “The label of war criminals kind of implies that someone has been through a criminal process. But they haven’t. And they’re not even being investigated through a criminal process.”

Exxon Mobil is disputing a US Court of Appeals ruling that it can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute for human rights abuses committed in Indonesia. In a petition for a rehearing, the company’s lawyers argue the decision’s “incorrect expansion of ATS liability threatens to unleash a flood of litigation in U.S. courts for actions lacking any salient connection to the United States” and called on the court to “reject the notion that the ATS can be used as a vehicle to bring suit in U.S. courts for alleged misconduct that occurred abroad.” And lawyers for alleged victims of human rights abuses surrounding a Guatemalan mine say Canada’s HudBay Minerals “cannot avoid liability for their past actions by selling the project.”

The Guardian’s John Vidal argues last week’s UN report on oil pollution in Nigeria’s Ogoniland region means “the conspiracy of silence between governments and oil companies has at last been broken.” While Kenya’s Business Daily carries the headline: “Multinationals, not corrupt politicians are the biggest source of dirty money flows.”

The University of the West of England, Bristol’s Diana Jeater reports on perceptions among Zimbabweans of international NGOs and aid agencies that “are mistrusted not least because they are perceived as part of the political strategies of donor governments.” She says there is also much “frustration at how the external agendas are introduced without proper research into local conditions and history” and a widespread “sense that the aid agencies are employers not helpers, who probably do more harm than good.” Jeater then concludes with a friend’s assessment of aid agencies operating in Zimbabwe: “They spend millions but they make no constructive difference. They just meet their funders’ benchmarks and get paid. They are parasites on the poor.”