Global Witness

Global Witness’s first campaign was in Cambodia in the 1990s where the Khmer Rouge was smuggling timber into Thailand. The Observer newspaper attributed the cessation to Global Witness's "detailed and accurate reporting".[15]

After a report implicating relatives of Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior government officials, the prime minister's brother, Hun Neng, who is also a provincial governor, was quoted in a Cambodian newspaper as saying if anyone from Global Witness returned to Cambodia, he would "hit them until their heads are broken."[16] In 2009, Global Witness released Country for Sale,[17] a report on corruption in the allocation of Cambodia's natural resource licenses. In 2010 the report, Shifting Sand, was published. It examined sand dredging for export to Singapore. The report claimed that the trade was "monopolised by two prominent Cambodian senators with close ties to Prime Minister Hun Sen".[18]

In 1998 Global Witness released the report, A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and Governments in the Angolan Conflict,[19] describing the role of the international diamond trade in funding the Angolan Civil War.

As part of its campaign against conflict diamonds, Global Witness helped establish the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KCPS). The international governmental certification scheme was set up to stop to trade in blood diamonds, requiring governments to certify that shipments of rough diamonds are conflict-free.[20] Like many other Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Sierra Leone is endowed with oil and mineral resources amid social inequality, high prevalence of poverty, and conflict.[21]

Under rebel movements headed by Charles Taylor, who dominated the diamond industry, diamonds were being traded for guns with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).[22] This rebel group alone earned as much as US$125 m. In 1998, Global Witness stated that diamonds were spurring those conflicts. Backed by investigation done by the UN in 2000, it was then verified that the gems were being smuggled out of eastern Sierra Leone through Liberia, and subsequently into the international market. Sanctions were later imposed by the UN on Liberian diamonds in March 2001.

On July 19, 2000, the World Diamond Congress adopted at Antwerp a resolution to reinforce the diamond industry's ability to block sales of conflict diamonds.[23] Thereafter, with growing international pressure from Global Witness and other NGOs, meetings were hosted with diamond-producing countries over three years, concluding in the establishment of an international diamond certification scheme in January 2003. The certification system on the export and import of diamonds, known as the KCPS, was called by the resolution, imposing legislation in all countries to accept shipment of only officially sealed packages of diamonds accompanied by a KP certificate guaranteeing that they were conflict-free. Anyone found trafficking conflict diamonds will be indicted of criminal charges, while bans were to be imposed on individuals found trading those stones from diamond bourses under the World Federation of Diamond Bourses.

The Kimberley Process (KP) in Sierra Leone was efficient in limiting the flow of conflict diamonds. More importantly, the KP assisted in restoring peace and security in the lives of these people, and, by creating stability in these environments, it spurred their development. It was successful at channelling larger amounts of diamonds into the international market, boosting government revenues, and consequently aiding in tackling development concerns. In 2006, an estimated US$125 m worth of diamonds were legally exported from Sierra Leone, compared to almost none in the 1990s.[20]

Despite its success, nine years later, on 5 December 2011, Global Witness announced that it has left the KP, stating that the scheme's main flaws have not been mended as governments no longer continue to show interest in reform.[24]

Global Witness campaigns for greater transparency in the oil, gas, and mining sectors. It is a founding member of the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) coalition, which advocates "the mandatory disclosure of company payments and government revenues from the oil, gas, and mining sector". Over 300 civil society groups worldwide are member of PWYP. Other PWYP founders include CAFOD, Oxfam, Save the Children UK, Transparency International UK, and George Soros, Chairman of the Open Society Institute.

Global Witness helped establish the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which was announced by then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002 and formally endorsed by the World Bank in December 2003. The EITI is a result of the efforts of the PWYP campaigners. It is now supported by a majority of the world's oil, mining and gas companies and institutional investors, in total worth US$8.3 trillion.[25] Global Witness is a member of the EITI International Advisory Group and sits on the EITI board.

Global Witness is active on a range of issues in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Their website section on DRC reads, "Politicians, military and militia groups have plundered the country's natural wealth and used it to enrich themselves at the detriment of the population."[26] Global Witness has lobbied the UK government and the UN Security Council to stop the trade in minerals fuelling war in eastern Congo.

Global Witness defines conflict resources as "natural resources whose systematic exploitation and trade in a context of conflict contribute to, benefit from or result in the commission of serious violations of human rights, violations of international humanitarian law or violations amounting to crimes under international law."[27]

Global Witness has done a lot of work on forests. It produced reports on how timber helped to fund the civil war in Liberia and also looked at timber smuggling from Burma into China.[28] Recently, Global Witness launched a court case in France against DLH, a company that they allege bought timber from Liberian companies during the civil war between 2001–2003, thereby providing support to Charles Taylor's regime.[29]

Global Witness describes forests as the "last bastion against climate change", with deforestation accounting for 18 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions.[30] On UN efforts to broker a deal on "Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" (REDD) Global Witness said: "REDD carries considerable risks for forests and local communities and will only succeed if civil society is engaged as an independent watchdog to ensure that the money is used in accordance with national laws and international guidelines."[31]

Global Witness criticizes the World Bank-endorsed approach of encouraging industrial export-based logging as a means to economic growth in developing countries, which, it argues, has been repeatedly shown to fail. Instead, Global Witness advocates management strategies that benefit the communities that are dependent on forests, their home countries, the environment, and treats forests as an "international asset".[30]

Global Witness campaigns against anonymous companies and for registers of beneficial ownership. Anonymous companies are a legal business practice but can be used for purposes such as laundering money from criminal activity, financing terrorism, or evading taxes.[32]

In 2009 Global Witness launched a campaign on the role of banks in facilitating corruption. Its report, Undue Diligence,[33] names some of the major banks that have done business with corrupt regimes. It argues that "by accepting these customers, banks are assisting those who are using state assets to enrich themselves or brutalise their own people" and that "this corruption denies the world's poorest people the chance to lift themselves out of poverty and leaves them dependent on aid."[33]

Global Witness is on the Coordinating Committee of Taskforce on Financial Integrity and Economic Development, and is a member of BankTrack, and the UNCAC Coalition of Civil Society Organisations. In May 2009, Global Witness employee, Anthea Lawson, testified before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee on "Capital Loss, Corruption and the Role of Western Financial Institutions".[34] In a letter to The Guardian dated 9 February 2010, Ms Lawson accused UK banks of "demonstrated complicity" in corruption.[35]

Global Witness has campaigned for transparency in Sudan's oil industry. Global Witness published Fuelling Mistrust in June 2009, a report that detailed discrepancies of up to 26 percent between the production figures published by the Sudanese government and those published by the main oil company operating in the region, CNPC. A peace deal between the north and the south was predicated on an agreement to share the revenues from oil.[36]

In June 2010, Global Witness criticized Zimbabwe for large-scale human rights abuses committed in the Marange diamond fields. It published a report Return of the Blood Diamond which criticised the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme for repeatedly failing to react effectively to the crisis in Zimbabwe.[37] In July 2010 Tendai Midzi, writing in The Zimbabwe Guardian, accused Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada of being "but a figment of the western governments they represent".[38]

Global Witness exposed corruption in land deals within the administration of Taib Mahmud, the chief minister of the state of Sarawak in Malaysia through the video titled "Inside Malaysia's Shadow State."[39] The video featured footage of conversations with relatives of Taib and their lawyer where Global Witness agents posed as potential investors.[40]

In 2019, Global Witness recorded the murders of 212 environmental activists, making it the worst year since this recording process began, in 2012.[4] This was up from the number of 197 killed in 2018.[41]