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	1.3 million Rohingya have been stripped of all rights by Tom Andrews United to End Genocide Myanmar/Burma   Despite heartening news of political reforms in Burma, recurring violence and looming humanitarian crises raise questions of the government’s ability and willingness to protect civilians.   United Nations officials and independent human rights groups have reported evidence of direct state complicity in ethnic cleansing and severe human rights abuses, blocking of humanitarian aid and incitement of anti-Muslim violence, constituting ominous warning signs of grave human rights abuses.   The Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority in Burma have been called “the most oppressed people on Earth”. They suffer vicious attacks and systematic abuse by Burma’s government.   The 1.3 million Rohingya have been denied citizenship and stripped of all rights. They are forced to live in Apartheid conditions where they cannot travel, work or even marry without permission. Over 140,000 were forced in situations similar to concentration camps after their homes and villages were burnt to the ground in 2012, and remain there today.   The government of Burma denies their very existence, prohibiting the use of their name and pressuring foreign officials not even to utter the word Rohingya. According to Burma’s President Thein Sein, “There are no Rohingya” in Burma.”   Unless the policies of hate end in Burma, the crisis will only escalate. Fleeing the threat of genocide in Burma, over 100,000 ethnic minority Rohingya have taken a perilous journey to leave the country by sea.   With an enormous amount of influence in Burma, the U.S. has a moral obligation to confront the source of this hell – Burma’s systematic repression and endangerment of 1.3 million Rohingya people living there. Unless the policies of hate end in Burma, the crisis will only escalate.   “What you say over there, is heard over here. Please, keep speaking out for us.” That’s what Bibi Khadija said to me in a sweltering refugee camp in Malaysia this summer. I met Bibi, an ethnic minority Rohingya, who fled the country fearing for her and her family’s life. Bibi is one of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who has taken the perilous journey to escape the ominous warning signs of genocide in Burma.   http://endgenocide.org/conflict-areas/burma-backgrounder/ Visit the related web page
	Corporate Capture by Ana Margarita Gonzalez Dejusticia, agencies   A common practice of private companies is attempting to influence the legislation and institutional framework of States in order to design policies that favor their interests.   Corporate capture is defined as undue influence that corporations exercise over national and international public institutions to maneuver in accordance with their interests and against the general public interest and the duty to respect, protect, and guarantee human rights.   Companies adopt different mechanisms to co-opt governmental decisions that establish norms regarding companies’ actions in different countries.   Thus, it is important for civil society organizations and communities to understand the way in which companies act, and to design strategies to avoid their undue influence in public policy decisions. In spite of companies’ almost unlimited capacity to concrete this agenda, civil society organizations can challenge and denounce these practices.   Global South experiences are particularly useful to identify the elements of a strategy for civil society organizations.   Corporate Capture Strategies   Lobbying politicians or public policy makers and direct financing of political parties to influence national policy agendas is the most frequent form of corporate capture.   Similarly, the so-called “revolving door,” which consists in moving key members of the public sector to the private sector and vice versa, is also popular.   In addition to influencing or creating incentives for the executive, companies also seek to influence judicial decisions and mold public debate through the activity of NGOs and think tanks. Companies not only attempt to influence think tank activity, but also create and finance non-profit organizations, allegedly independent, to guide public debate, such as the recently denounced Global Warming Policy Foundation, whose principal mission is to deny the relationship between human activity and climate change.   In spaces for the definition of global policies regarding company activities, Greenpeace has denounced the presence of more than 124 organizations financed by Exxon that attempt to question climate change for the benefit of this company.   In negotiations during Conferences of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the extractives sector organizes booths, dinners, meetings, and participates in meetings as observers, through commercial organizations that are considered NGOs under the current rules of the COP, as happened in the earlier Varsovia COP.   This situation leads to the question of what strategies organizations can develop to prevent corporate capture at the domestic and international decision making levels. At the national level, various organizations have attempted to use legal action and public exposure to denounce the undue influence of companies in the public sector.   With respect to legal actions, the Brazilian organization Terra de Direitos has created enough pressure to restrict corporate support for judicial events and prohibit the granting of corporate incentives to members of the judiciary. Via litigation before the Brazilian National Justice Committee, organizations managed to impose limits on stimuli and forced the judiciary to be accountable.   In Kenya, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission has lobbied to strengthen the right to information in order to achieve greater transparency and visibility of regulatory proposals in the legislature regarding corporate behavior, as well as strategies to clarify the rules regarding financing and interest rates.   Additionally, strategies of exposing the relationships between sectors has been useful for studying corporate capture and designing mechanisms to combat it.   The Who is who Wiki initiative, undertaken by Mexican organizations, includes a database that reveals corporate ties to Mexican politics, accompanied by a media campaign.   At the level of global policies related to climate change, the Center for Democracy has undertaken a research initiative regarding corporate ties to the COP in Lima, held at the end of 2014. This project is the fruit of a strategy of collaboration between NGOs and research centers, and the reports on the role of extractive industries in negotiations demonstrates the contradiction between the interests of corporations (who are generally responsible for pollution), and the progress of negotiations.   To counteract corporate capture, civil society needs to have a broad array of measures and strategies, in addition to political will of the State and companies. For civil society, collective measures that promote information, transparency, and monitoring of companies, so that the regulations of business activities in various sectors avoid greater human rights violations.   *Ana Margarita Gonzalez is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia)   http://dejusticiablog.com/2014/11/10/civil-society-answers-to-corporate-capture/   Feb 17, 2015   Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of Oxfam International, is delivering the inaugural International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Lecture at the 38th session of the Governing Council, IFAD"s annual meeting of Member States. IFAD asked Byanyima to share her thoughts on the role of development aid in the context of the Governing Council"s theme: rural transformation: Extract.   Winnie Byanyima: "One final point about the impact of inequity on the future of aid: Just as aid alone cannot solve the challenge of poverty, aid cannot solve the problem of inequality. But how aid is delivered can influence how responsive partner governments are to their own citizens.   Too often, the impact of aid and the actions of donors can reinforce existing power relationships in partner countries, assisting elites in their efforts to capture and retain power over how national resources are distributed. When aid is given blindly in a way that benefits bad leaders or a small cadre of wealthy people, it makes it harder for citizens to influence how taxes are collected, how national assets are distributed, or how government services are allocated. This can lead to elites capturing the state for their own selfish ends, worsening inequality.   Yet when delivered well, aid can help to improve public accountability, complementing government spending on much-needed public goods, and support citizen’s efforts to hold their governments to account. This accountability to citizens is the antidote to political capture, and can help disadvantaged people and groups get the policies they need to reduce inequality both of opportunities and outcomes.   Smallholder farmers are often politically, socially and geographically remote from development decision-making. To combat poverty and inequality, aid needs to support the poor and marginalized to find their voice and claim their vote in how development resources are distributed". http://www.ifad.org/events/gc/38/oxfam.htm   Australian Tony Fitzgerald, QC, a highly respected former judge, states of Australian Democracy: "The well-connected and wealthy, are given access to and influence over the political process".. "Access can now be purchased. Patronage is dispensed. Mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their connections to obtain success fees for deals between business and government."   There are 4,000 corporate lobbyists in Canberra, Australia, more than 20,000 at K-Street, in Washington D.C., many thousands more in London, Brussels.. - they are active in every capital of nearly every country in the world pursuing their interests.   The Global Financial Crisis was precipitated by the deregulation of the banking and financial sector in the U.S. at the behest of corporate lobbyists, with widespread negative global consequences. In the upcoming American Presidential election the Conservative Koch Brothers are planning to spend 1 billion dollars to ensure the election of business friendly politicians to advance the interests of the 1%. In China, widespread popular outrage compelled President Xi Jinping to launch an anti-corruption initiative that has so far identified over 25,000 corrupt Government officials and is ongoing.   Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, was elected last year promising to address widespread perceived corruption. Last week in Delhi, India the anti-corrption party Aam Adami had resounding victory in legislative elections, over Prime Minster Narendra Modi''s BJP Party - promising to address widepread official corruption.   Accountability advocates lament the nexus between Government and major business leaders in Russia. During the recent South African elections, Jacob Zuma from the African National Congress promised again to address corruption. In Cambodia, hundreds of thousands of dispossessed small landowners are calling for their land rights to be recognised.   Civil Society advocates can often face repression, threats, intimidation''s and much worse for calling for justice and the respect of their rights from powerful actors who benefit most from inequitable arrangements.   Current major international Multilateral Trade Agreements under negotiations (Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) impacting well over a billion people have been criticized for their lack of transparency, and serious concerns raised by the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions allowing investors to sue governments if policy changes or even court rulings substantially affect "the value of their investment", yet do not allow governments to sue investors for breaching the right to health.   Investor state dispute settlement processes constrain governments abilities to regulate on the basis of the precautionary principle, or even to implement health policies on the basis of established evidence reported The Lancet medical journal this week.   Transparency International every year cites the widespread corruption of the political processes in countries around the world.   (Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates, “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.” Corporate capture is defined by the undue influence that corporations exert over public institutions, manipulating them to act according to their priorities, at the expense of the public interest and the integrity of the systems required to respect, protect and fulfill human rights. Through corporate capture parties exert political influence over the legislative process, and the state regulators charged with enforcing laws, weakening provisions in the law or their implementation).   * Links to agencies that further explore these concerns:   http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/five-years-after-citizens-united-signs-backlash http://www.citizen.org/ http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Business/Pages/BusinessIndex.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/Pages/Fiscalandtaxpolicy2014.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ESCR/Pages/ESCRIndex.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/ListOfIssues.aspx http://www.hrw.org/topic/business http://www.fidh.org/International-Federation-for-Human-Rights/globalisation-human-rights/business-and-human-rights/ http://business-humanrights.org/ http://www.srfood.org/en http://www.landcoalition.org/node/2581 http://www.rtfn-watch.org/ http://www.righttowater.info/ http://www.right2water.eu/ http://www.msfaccess.org/ http://corporateeurope.org/media http://www.escr-net.org/thematic-focus/corporate-accountability http://www.aepf.info/news/articles/57-corporate-capture-at-the-heart-of-europe http://www.ibanet.org/Human_Rights_Institute/TaskForce_IllicitFinancialFlows_Poverty_HumanRights.aspx http://academicsstand.org/2014/06/press-release-un-goals-should-do-more-to-curb-tax-dodging-that-has-cost-poor-countries-trillions/ http://taxjustice.net http://resourcecentre.savethechildren.se/library/tackling-tax-and-saving-lives-children-tax-and-financing-development http://www.icij.org/offshore http://business-humanrights.org/en/search-topics
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