Tag Archives: International Criminal Court

Latest Developments, September 13

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Spreading strikes
The Guardian reports that South Africa’s mining industry is on the verge of paralysis as labour unrest spreads in the wake of last month’s massacre of striking workers at Lonmin’s Marikana mine:

“The flames have been fanned by Julius Malema, a former youth leader who was expelled from the governing African National Congress for ill discipline this year.
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In an interview on South Africa’s Talk Radio 702 on Wednesday, Malema said: ‘We are calling for mine change in South Africa. We want the mines nationalised. We want the workers paid a living wage … and somebody has to listen.
‘Maybe this call has been ridiculed … by the authorities and mining bosses. Now we want to show them that we mean business. We are going to be engaging in very peaceful yet radical and militant action that will hit straight into the pockets of white monopoly capital.’ ”

Dying for PR
The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Patrick Bond argues that World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s recent visit to South Africa was an exercise in public relations concerning his institution’s past and present impacts on the country’s people:

“Bank-financed electricity mainly supplied South Africa’s mining houses and smelters, as is still the case (the main customer of the Medupi coal-fired power station currently being built will be BHP Billiton, which consumes more than 10% of the country’s power to smelt aluminium). Then and now, this facilitated South Africa’s notorious migrant labour system, with low pay to migrant workers who succumbed to TB in squalid, single-sex, 16-to-a-room hostels and shacks.
Kim failed to address these historic issues, which are mirrored in his institution’s current portfolio, especially the [International Finance Corporation’s] controversial commitment (approved by former president Paul Wolfowitz in 2007) of $150m in equity/credit lines to Lonmin at the Marikana mine, as well as the $3.75bn for the Medupi plant north of Pretoria, pushed through by his immediate predecessor, Robert Zoellick.
The 34 victims of the Marikana massacre were mainly migrants from Lesotho and the Eastern Cape. Their migrant labour status replicates apartheid, including health vulnerability in disease-ridden shack settlements.”

Boat tragedies
Human Rights Watch’s Judith Sunderland calls out European governments over their failure to prevent migrant deaths at sea, after an estimated 140 people died in the Mediterranean last week:

“The truth is that European Union governments on the Mediterranean rim and the EU as a whole have focused far more effort on border control, including in ways that violate rights, than on preventing deaths at sea.
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The EU needs to live up to European values this time around and do its utmost to ensure that those fleeing Syria reach safety and a meaningful chance to apply for asylum. We cannot mourn only the deaths of asylum seekers, though. None of those who perished last week deserved to die, regardless of their nationality or reasons for trying to reach Europe.”

Exploration hiatus
Bloomberg reports that Tanzania’s opposition is calling for “a 10-year moratorium on licensing offshore oil and gas blocks” so that the country has time to implement laws that will ensure it benefits from the exploitation of its natural resources:

“Tanzania, the holder of East Africa’s second-biggest natural-gas resources, in June tripled its estimate of recoverable gas reserves to 28.7 trillion cubic feet. The government postponed its next deep offshore bidding round, originally scheduled to start tomorrow, pending the adoption of a natural gas policy by lawmakers. Parliament may approve the draft document as soon as October.
‘A moratorium will not only allow us to manage our new resources effectively, it will also ensure the welfare of future generations,’ [Shadow Finance Minister Zitto] Kabwe said in an e-mailed statement. It would give time to set up a sovereign development fund, train Tanzanians for jobs in the industry, and make sure oversight bodies are monitoring oil and gas revenues, Kabwe said.”

Trade secrecy
Inter Press service reports on the “unusually tight secrecy” at negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which are now in their 14th round:

“Thus, while inklings of the countries’ positions on the varying issues have come to light through brief public statements and leaked documents, the details of how the talks are progressing are known only to the negotiators and the corporations that have been given access to the draft documents.
According to activists, of the 600 advisors that the U.S. negotiators have used surrounding the talks, 84 percent have been corporate interests.
Indeed, not only has there been an ongoing lack of direct civil-society involvement in the TPP process, but progress in the negotiations has been kept secret from even the U.S. Congress. With the start of the 14th round of talks this weekend, a bipartisan letter was sent from Congress to Trade Representative Kirk, insisting “in the strongest terms possible” that Kirk’s office publicise details on what is being discussed, specifically with regards to intellectual property rights.”

Blasé about torture
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports on a UN expert’s comments that suggest there has been “a paradigm shift” in the way Western society views torture:

“Speaking at Chatham House on the record last night [Juan] Méndez, UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, bemoaned a change in attitude. ‘We have lost an important asset that we had in the fight against torture: the moral indignation,’ he told the audience. ‘In the last ten years the culture has generated a sense that perhaps torture is inevitable or even necessary.’
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The Obama administration reinstated the Code on Military Justice. However, Méndez candidly explained that the decision not to address what happened around the Torture Memos reveals a refusal to accept the US’s obligations under international law.
‘It’s a very disappointing decision,’ he said, ‘you can imagine how frustrating it is for a special rapporteur to go around the world saying we have to investigate, prosecute and punish crimes of torture, when the US doesn’t.’ ”

Multilateral views
UN Dispatch’s Mark Goldberg reports on a recent public opinion study that suggests American attitudes are rather well-disposed toward international cooperation on a range of global issues:

“The survey shows that Americans prefer a cooperative approach to American foreign policy and believe the UN should be a platform for cooperation even when it means the USA must compromise a bit.
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Another related part of the polling asks respondents attitudes toward various international treaties to which the USA has not acceded, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and a post-Kyoto international climate change convention. Guess what? Americans are very supportive of the USA joining all three!”

Latest Developments, July 10

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ICC first
Reuters reports that the International Criminal Court in The Hague has handed down its first ever sentence:

“Delivering its first sentence, the International Criminal Court jailed Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for 14 years on Tuesday for recruiting child soldiers.
Lubanga was found guilty in March of abducting boys and girls under the age of 15 and forcing them to fight in a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).”

Arms Trade Treaty talks
IRIN reports on the key discussion points as the second of four weeks kicks off at UN talks intended to produce an international agreement regulating the trade in conventional weapons:

“The meeting will tackle three overriding issues in formulating a conventional arms treaty: Scope – to determine which categories of weapons will be included; criteria – establishing a minimum threshold for the transfer of weapons and taking into account UN arms embargos, as well as the potential for an arms shipment to be denied if weapons could be used in violation of international human rights law; and implementation – covering the establishment by each potential signatory of transparent and competent regulating authorities.”

Obama’s inequality focus
The Globe and Mail reports that US President Barack Obama has chosen income inequality as a central theme in his reelection bid, by pushing for increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans:

“[Obama] is asking Congress to pass a one-year extension of lower tax rates for households earning under $250,000 (U.S.). The cuts, first passed in 2001 under George W. Bush, were prolonged in 2010 and are now set to expire on Dec. 31.
But while the middle-class would get tax relief for at least another year under Mr. Obama’s proposal, the 2 per cent of U.S. households earning more than $250,000 would see their income taxes rise by thousands of dollars in 2013 in an effort to tame the deficit.
‘We’ve tried it their way. It didn’t work,’ Mr. Obama said Monday of the ‘trickle-down’ economic theory that inspired the Bush-era reduction in income tax rates on top earners. ‘The wealthy got wealthier, but most Americans struggled.’

In the name of development
The Oakland Institute has released a new report on the human impact of a massive land deal between US-based AgriSol Energy and the Tanzanian government:

“The project initiated in 2007-2008 has moved forward without public debate or consent, and will evict more than 160,000 long-term residents of Katumba and Mishamo, who remain in the dark over compensation and relocation plans. The AgriSol land deal is a part of Kilimo Kwanza, or Agriculture First, the Tanzanian government’s scheme to promote agricultural development through public-private partnerships.
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‘Caught in the crossfire of this egregious land deal are more than 160,000 newly naturalized Tanzanians–former Burundian refugees who fled civil war more than 40 years ago. Initially promised citizenship, the residents still await their papers, conditional on them vacating their homes and lands in order to make way for the foreign investor. The residents have been banned from cultivating crops including perennial crops such as cassava or building new homes and businesses, leaving them with no other option but to consider moving. This is how the situation will be resolved for AgriSol,’ said Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute and coauthor of the report.”

Thirst for tourism
Tourism Concern has released a new report on the water impacts of foreign visitors in vacation hotspots Zanzibar, Goa, Kerala, The Gambia and Bali:

“All regions are highly dependent on tourism as a means to generate jobs and economic growth. However, tourism cannot fulfil its potential as a contributor to poverty alleviation and sustainable development while it so often causes the unsustainable depletion and inequitable appropriation of freshwater.
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On average, households across the three villages [on Zanzibar] consume some 93.2 litres of water per day. The types of tourist accommodation in each village varies, but average consumption per room ranges from 686 litres per day for guesthouses, to 3,195 litres per day for 5-star hotels. This gives an overall average consumption of 1,482 litres per room per day: 16 times higher than average household daily usage.”

The mining minefield
The McLeod Group has released a new paper on the development impacts of the Canadian extractive sector’s overseas activities:

“Who will stand up for the rights of local communities when a bad government joins forces with a ruthless and impatient company? This is where international oversight is indispensable.
These are challenging issues that have too often been overlooked by companies and policy makers. This needs to change. Developing countries should no longer be seen as a place of expedient profiteering, where foreign companies can operate in ways that would never be tolerated in their home countries.”

IP recalibration
Intellectual Property Watch reports that the UN Human Rights Council has expressed support for the continued work of a specially appointed expert on cultural rights who recently produced a report on access to “the benefits of scientific progress”:

“ ‘[T]he Special Rapporteur proposes the adoption of a public good approach to knowledge innovation and diffusion, and suggests reconsidering the current maximalist intellectual property approach to explore the virtues of a minimalist approach to IP protection,’ the May 2012 report said. ‘Recalibrating intellectual property norms that may present a barrier to the right to science and establishing greater coherence among them seem to be necessary steps. The Special Rapporteur stresses the need to guard against promoting the privatization of knowledge to an extent that deprives individuals of opportunities to take part in cultural life and to enjoy the fruits of scientific progress, which would also impoverish society as whole.’ ”

More special economic zone
The Economist reports that China is planning to take one of its grandest experiments to the next level in a currently vacant 15-square-kilometre chunk of the Shenzen Special Economic Zone:

“The zone has licence to try policies that are ‘more special’ than those prevailing even in an SEZ. It aims to attract ‘modern service industries’ rather than big-box manufacturers. It will charge only 15% corporate-profit tax and levy no income taxes on the finance professionals, lawyers, accountants and creative people it hopes eventually to attract.
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Its firms will be given help in raising yuan offshore. Hong Kong banks will be allowed to enter the zone more easily. The ground will also be laid for greater cross-border lending. ‘Since the mainland is targeting the gradual achievement of full yuan convertibility, Qianhai should be a pioneer for progress,’ said Zhang Xiaoqiang of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s planning body.”

Latest Developments, May 31

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Universal justice?
Following the 50-year sentence handed down by a court in The Hague to former Liberian president Charles Taylor, the Daily Beast reports on some of the different views held in the country he once ruled concerning Western-style justice.
“Just last week, controversy arose when a commissioner from the nation’s Independent National Human Rights Commission (INHRC) was quoted by media outlets as saying that the body would be forwarding names of Liberians to the International Criminal Court to be considered for prosecution.
Leroy Urey, chairman of the commission, said the statement did not reflect the view of the body. Commissioner Thomas Bureh, who was quoted in various Liberian media outlets, has stepped away from the comment and said that reconciliation should be Liberia’s primary focus.
According to a report by Front Page Africa, Mr. Urey accused Mr. Bureh of receiving bribes to make the statement: ‘I think Bureh has been tampered with by people in the erstwhile [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and the international community, especially [the UN Mission in Liberia],’ said Mr. Urey, according to the report.”

Boomerang bailout
The New York Times reports that most of Greece’s bailout money is going right back to where it came from.
“The European bailout of 130 billion euros ($163.4 billion) that was supposed to buy time for Greece is mainly servicing only the interest on the country’s debt — while the Greek economy continues to struggle.
If that seems to make little sense economically, it has a certain logic in the politics of euro-finance. After all, the money dispensed by the troika — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — comes from European taxpayers, many of whom are increasingly wary of the political disarray that has afflicted Athens and clouded the future of the euro zone.
As they pay themselves, though, the troika members are also withholding other funds intended to keep the Greek government in operation.”

Right to Water
Embassy Magazine reports that “after years of opposition,” the Canadian government has said it plans to recognize the human right to water.
“In an interview, [Environment Minister Peter] Kent told Embassy that Canada is now willing to remove its request for the statement on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation to be deleted.
At the same time, he maintained that the right to water should not encompass ‘trans-boundary water issues or the export of water, or any mandatory allocation of international development assistance.’
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Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN special rapporteur for the right to water, publicly condemned Canada for its stance in a speech on world water day, March 22.”

Pan-African vote
Press TV reports that the Pan-African parliament has chosen Bethel Amadi to be its new president, though the body’s powers remain strictly “consultative and advisory.”
“Already commentators have criticized it, saying that without being able to pass binding resolutions, the parliament risks becoming nothing more than a talkshop. The new president admits the step to achieve legislative powers is one of his biggest challenges…
In order to be ratified, the amendment must receive the support of 28 countries. The Pan-African Parliament is hopeful a tangible step in this direction will be taken at the African Union Heads of State meeting in Malawi in July.”

Executive maximum wage
Reuters reports that France’s new government aims to unveil next month its plans to impose a relative cap on the salaries of top executives at state-controlled companies.
“Elected this month promising to curb the privileges enjoyed by France’s wealthy and powerful, Socialist President Francois Hollande pledged during campaigning to limit senior executives’ salaries to a maximum of 20 times that of their lowest-paid employee.
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While restricted to state-controlled firms, the French pay limit could affect a number of listed companies including nuclear power plant builder Areva and utility EDF.”

Drone survivors
Harper’s provides a series of statements made by families of victims and survivors of a 2011 US drone strike in Pakistan’s North Waziristan.
“The men who died in this strike were our leaders; the ones we turned to for all forms of support. We always knew that drone strikes were wrong, that they encroached on Pakistan’s sovereign territory. We knew that innocent civilians had been killed. However, we did not realize how callous and cruel it could be. The community is now plagued with fear. The tribal elders are afraid to gather together in jirgas, as had been our custom for more than a century. The mothers and wives plead with the men not to congregate together. They do not want to lose any more of their husbands, sons, brothers, and nephews. People in the same family now sleep apart because they do not want their togetherness to be viewed suspiciously through the eye of the drone. They do not want to become the next target.”

Spear’s silver lining
The Centre for the Study of Democracy’s Steven Friedman argues that the controversy over a painting depicting South African President Jacob Zuma’s genitals will have done some good if it leads to an acknowledgment of the sense of frustration among many that “minority rule is still with us.”
“[The solution] rests, rather, in recognising that the attitudes that made apartheid possible have not disappeared and that those who were powerful then still are — not in politics, perhaps, but in the economy, in the professions and in our cultural life. To name but one example — despite constant complaints about affirmative action, research shows that it is still harder for black graduates to get work than it is for their white counterparts.
While the row over the painting seems like a diversion, there is nothing trivial about a widespread sense that black people still do not enjoy the respect and access to opportunities due to citizens of a democracy. There is no more important issue than the charge that we are not overcoming our past.”

World Bank transparency
Global Financial Integrity “applauded” the World Bank for committing to the public disclosure of its decisions regarding sanctions against companies and individuals over allegations of fraud and corruption.
“ ‘Knowing which companies have been debarred is helpful, but understanding why a company has been debarred is critical in the fight against fraud and corruption.  The methods used by companies and individuals, who are defrauding the World Bank, are methods used to defraud governments, businesses, and individuals globally,’ [said GFI’s Heather Lowe.]”

Latest Developments, April 26

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International justice
Following the guilty verdict delivered against former Liberian President Charles Taylor by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Oxford University’s Christine Cheng discusses some of the problems with international justice as currently practiced.
“Courts build their legitimacy partly based on the cases that they choose to hear. By focusing predominantly on Africans, there is a real worry that the ICC will be perceived by non-Western countries as providing a cloak of legitimacy for the US and other Western nations to achieve their political aims— despite the fact that the ICC’s chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo has explicitly stated that the ICC is not a court ‘just for the Third World.’
What the international community needs to guard against is allowing the ICC to become a tool that Western liberal democracies can impose on developing country leaders who have fallen out of political favour. For the ICC to remain viable, neither can it be perceived as the backdoor by which Western powers target their political enemies.”

Quake aid
The Center for Global Development’s Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz look into where US funds intended for quake relief in Haiti ended up going.
“The U.S. Department of Defense, which took responsibility for security in Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, was the largest recipient. The remainder of the funds went to large international NGOs, private contractors, and other agencies of the U.S. government such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Health and Human Services (HHS). As we have blogged previously, less than one percent went to the Government of Haiti to rebuild public institutions. And Haitian-led NGOs have barely received any money at all.
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Contracts to Haitian firms remain few and far between. Following a request from Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch, USAID released data on its procurement from local contractors in Haiti. Local contracts add up to $9.45 million, which is only 0.02 percent of total contracts awarded by USAID. Over 75 percent of USAID funds went to private contractors inside the Beltway (located in Washington DC, Maryland, or Virginia).”

Bioeconomy
Inter Press Service reports that critics of the new US National Bioeconomy Blueprint say it emphasizes economic interests at the expense of social and environmental ones.
“ ‘The bio-economy approach offers politicians in industrialized countries an opportunity to be seen to be doing something about meeting ill-defined “renewable energy targets”, while maximizing opportunities for economic growth and securing a constant supply of energy,’ [the Global Forest Coalition’s “Bio-economy Versus Biodiversity” report] warns. “There is precious little concern about the environment, or about impacts in other countries, apart from the usual platitudes about providing jobs.’ ”

Maid in India
A new Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations/India Committee of the Netherlands report details rights abuses at Indian textile plants that supply Western clothing companies.
“For real change, scale is needed. Corporate and other initiatives, certification bodies and business associations should push their members to commit to real action, or discipline them. The voluntary character of compliance activities should urgently become more binding. Freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are key rights that enable workers to defend their rights. Both manufacturers and buyers should actively ensure these rights are respected.”

Laws of war
Lawyer Chase Madar argues a Wikileaks-obtained video showing US helicopters killing a number of unarmed Iraqis – an act that may well have been legal – is “an indictment of the laws of war as we know them.”
“Let’s be clear: What killed the civilians walking the streets of Baghdad that day in 2007 was not ‘war crimes’ but war. And that holds for so many thousands of other Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed by drone strikes, air strikes, night raids, convoys, and nervous checkpoint guards as well.
Who, after all, writes the laws of war? Just as the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical and airline industries are often gamed by large corporations with their phalanxes of lobbyists, the laws of war are also vulnerable to ‘regulatory capture’ by the great powers under their supposed rule. Keep in mind, for instance, that the Pentagon employs 10,000 lawyers and that its junior partner in foreign policy making, the State Department, has a few hundred more. Should we be surprised if in-house lawyers can sort out ‘legal’ ways not to let those laws of war get in the way of the global ambitions of a superpower?”

Good aid, bad aid
The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie asks if some donors are better than others.
“The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, certainly seems to think so, urging poor countries at an aid conference in Busan, South Korea, to ‘be wary of donors who are more interested in extracting your resources than in building your capacity’. It is hard to imagine a more absurd statement from a US official, given the country’s leading role in previous scrambles for Africa – not to mention its weak record (with other donors) of ‘building capacity’ over more than 50 years of aid-giving. From the cold war to aid conditionality supporting its own interests, to the pouring of money into the Horn of Africa after the 9/11 attacks, the US pretty much wrote the book on how to use aid to ensure strategic interests. Clinton should remember John Kennedy’s assertion in 1962: ‘Aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world … I put it right at the top of the essential programmes in protecting the security of the free world.’ ”

Population bomb
In an interview with the Guardian, Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich argues that both the numbers and behaviour of people pose a threat to the future of humanity.
“[Human population and consumption] multiply together. You have to be deal with them together. We have too much consumption among the rich and too little among the poor. That implies that terrible thing that we are going to have to do which is to somehow redistribute access to resources away the rich to the poor. But in the US we have been doing the opposite. The Republican party is wildly in favour of more redistribution, of taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.”

Latest Developments, April 12

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Suppressing dissent
A letter signed by 49 former officials from the UN Conference on Trade and Development says wealthy countries are trying to silence the organization because its economic analyses provide an alternative to the views of Western-dominated institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF.
“No organisation correctly foresaw the current crisis, and no organisation has a magic wand to deal with present difficulties. But it is unquestionable that the crisis originated in and is widespread among the countries that now wish to stifle debate about global economic policies, despite their own manifest failings in this area.
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So the developed countries in Geneva have seized the occasion to stifle UNCTAD’s capacity to think outside the box. This is neither a cost-saving measure nor an attempt to ‘eliminate duplication’ as some would claim. The budget for UNCTAD’s research work is peanuts and disparate views on economic policy are needed today more than ever as the world clamours for new economic thinking as a sustainable way out of the current crisis. No, it is rather – if you cannot kill the message, at least kill the messenger. ”

ICC reparations
IRIN reports that, following the International Criminal Court’s first-ever conviction last month, reparations for the victims has become a “thorny issue.”
“No other international criminal tribunal has ever awarded reparations, but under ICC rules, those who have suffered injury or harm from a crime for which someone is convicted could receive restitution, compensation or rehabilitation.
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‘The ICC was initially thinking of symbolic reparations,’ [Witness’s Bukeni] Waruzi said. ‘They were saying something like building a statue in the village that will really honour the victims. But reparations cannot be symbolic, because the crimes were not symbolic. It is now for the ICC to take full responsibility, to actually manage the expectations.’ ”

Spanish integration
Inter Press Service reports Spain’s latest national budget has cut off all funding for “social insertion, employment and education programmes” for immigrants to the debt-ridden country.
“SOS Racismo predicts that the disappearance of the fund will paralyse ‘hundreds of municipal and regional integration plans,’ and said its removal contravenes European Union agreements, such as the European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, established in July 2011.
According to SOS Racismo, ‘economic crises have different timescales to those needed to evaluate the extent of integration of an immigrant population that in recent years has seen its employment and family expectations frustrated.’ ”

Phasing out executions
Human Rights Watch says that five American states abolishing the death penalty in five years is a “clear sign” of the growing momentum against capital punishment in the US.
“Since 2007, the death penalty has been eliminated in New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, and Illinois. After Connecticut joins them, 17 US states will have rejected capital punishment.  Thirteen states that have the penalty on the books have not used it for at least five years. Challenges to the death penalty are also being mounted in California and Maryland.”

Big-box hate
The Atlantic reports on a new study which found a correlation between the presence of big-box stores and hate groups in communities across the US.
“Before anyone gets too worked up, the study’s authors aren’t saying that Walmarts cause hate groups to form (they’re also using Walmart here as a stand-in for all big box stores; Target merely got off the hook in the study headline). Rather, this research suggests national mega-stores like Walmart may fray the social capital in a community – by disrupting its economy and displacing the community leaders who run local businesses – in ways that enable hate groups to take hold.
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Of all the variables [the study’s authors] looked at, the number of Walmarts in a county was the second-most significant predictor of the presence of hate groups, behind only the designation of a county as a Metropolitan Statistical Area, or in other words an urban one.”

Private aid
Global Humanitarian Assistance has published a new report on the increasing privatization of humanitarian and development assistance, and some of the transparency issues associated with this trend.
“While global private support to large-scale emergencies is relatively easy to gauge, it remains unclear how much private money is out there in any given year. While the absence of dedicated tracking mechanisms for this type of financing certainly does nothing to improve clarity, it is the lack of consistent reporting on the income and expenditure of private aid funding globally that makes any attempt at tracking it a near impossible mission.
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If tracking total private voluntary contributions for humanitarian aid is a challenging task, gauging where this private money goes is an even more difficult enterprise. Very few humanitarian organisations report their private country or sector expenditure separately from their overall funding allocation.”

Drug-war addiction
The Universidad de Di Tella’s Juan Gabriel Tokatlian hopes the Obama administration’s appointment of a new “drug warrior” for Latin America and the Caribbean will mean a change of American tactics in the region.
“And, throughout Latin America, the situation has only worsened since the 1990’s. Indeed, Latin American countries’ US-backed fight against drugs has had universally destructive consequences in terms of civil-military relations, human-rights violations, and corruption.
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The military and political challenges are significant, the risks are considerable, and the benefits are uncertain. But if [United States Southern Command] does not implement major changes in how it prosecutes the drug war, the US will find itself facing an increasingly volatile and dangerous set of neighbors to the south.”

Extractive politics
OpenOil’s Johnny West argues the extractive industry is inherently more political than other forms of business and any attempts to regulate it must take this feature into account.
“Once you recognise rent as the essence of the global oil and the mining industries, you must recognise that everything about them is as much political, and geo-political, as it is economic. That is how historically mismanagement of those industries has led to such massive corruption and conflict. Nobody ever went to war over car manufacturing or internet service provision. When it comes to bananas or silicon chips, or intellectual copyright, the term ‘trade war’ is, thankfully, a metaphor.
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With oil, business is politics and politics is business, whatever anyone says. Technocratic solutions can only pick up where broader political questions have been settled.”