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	Promoting corporate accountability through legal advocacy by International Rights Advocates   By creatively using international human rights law in the US court system and those of other nations, International Rights Advocates (IRAdvocates) protects and empowers individuals victimized by multinational corporations and other powerful entities that traditionally enjoy impunity.   Designed to foster global operations that, at a minimum, conform to human rights principles, IRAdvocates will challenge platitudes about social responsibility and contribute to eliminating the corporate practice of imposing human rights violations on others.   The global effort to protect workers and hold corporations accountable for their business practices has taken many avenues, including monitoring, strengthening international laws and enforcement mechanisms, and social labeling initiatives.   One of the newest avenues non-profits have taken to promote corporate accountability has been through legal advocacy. IRAdvoactes is continuing the work started through the International Labor Rights Fund to use international human rights law to require multinational companies to comply with internationally recognized worker rights.   Specifically, IRAdvocates is using these cases to establish a precedent by basing its legal proceedings on the Alien Tort Claims Act (ACTA), a law aimed at protecting the nation''s international reputation by enabling non-citizens to use federal courts to hold Americans accountable for violations of international law. These cases seek to send a strong message to corporations: it is simply not acceptable to profit from human rights violations.   IRAdvocates provides a solid legal resource to all types of human rights activists seeking to hold governments and corporations accountable through the US legal system. Future litigation in this area will also give priority to cases that, while within the general accepted parameters, represent an incremental expansion of present jurisprudence.   Our New Challenges to Impunity Program seeks to litigate cutting edge cases that either provide a new theory for holding governments and corporations liable for human rights violations.   IRAdvocates is has been involved in several cases including:   * Bridgestone-Firestone: IRAdvocates filed a lawsuit in November 2005 on behalf of adults and children who work and live on the Firestone Plantation in Liberia. The suit charges that Bridgestone Firestone and several affiliated companies forced workers to meet impossible quotas and benefited from the widespread use of unlawful child labor.   * Chevron: In a case that presents the potential for a great leap in corporate accountability, suit was filed against Chevron for its pollution of the Ecuadorian rain forest that resulted in an epidemic of cancer in the region. While other legal groups have attempted to sue Chevron for the act of pollution and damage to property, this case is focused on the impact on the indigenous people in the region.   * Chiquita: In June 2007, IRAdvocates filed suit against Chiquita on behalf of the families of 173 workers murdered by paramilitaries.   The suit alleges that Chiquita’s complicity in the murders, as in order to force workers to quit a union or their job, to stop pressing legitimate grievances, or to accept poor working conditions, the corporation turned to the paramilitaries who acted by means of intimidation, threats, abductions, torture and murder for “protection.”   * Coca-Cola I: IRAdvocates advanced the legal efforts it began with the United Steelworkers Union in 2001 to hold Coca-Cola accountable for the murder and torture of trade union leaders in Colombia.   * Coca-Cola II: In 2005, 105 workers at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Istanbul organized a lengthy sit-down strike in front of the main offices of Coca-Cola in Turkey. While leaders of the workers were meeting with senior management for the company, the company ordered Turkish riot police to attack the workers who were by all accounts peacefully assembled, many with their spouses and children.   IRAdvocates filed suit on behalf of the victims for torture under the ATCA, as well as battery, assault, emotional distress under New York state law.   * Daimler Chrysler: IRAdvocates filed suit in 2005 on behalf of the families of individuals “disappeared” during the Argentine “Dirty War” for Daimler Chrysler’s complicity in these extra-judicial killings.   * Del Monte: In July 2001, a suit was filed on behalf of five former Guatemalan trade union leaders seeking damages from Del Monte Corporation for torture and unlawful detention related to their efforts to organize.   * Dole: Filed in April 2009, claims have been brought forward against Dole Food Company Inc. on behalf of 73 heirs of individuals who were murdered by paramilitiaries. The suit alleges that Dole''s complicity involved paying paramilitary organizations to quell labor movements and guarantee "security" to Dole''s employees and operations in Colombia.   * Drummond: A suit was filed in 2002 against the Drummond Company, an Alabama-based mining corporation with facilities in La Loma, Colombia, asserting claims on behalf of union mineworkers in Colombia who were tortured, kidnapped, and murdered by paramilitary gunmen.   * DynCorp: Filed in September 2001, claims have been brought forward against DynCorp for crimes against humanity and wrongful death on behalf of Ecuadorian subsistence farmers with no connection to the drug trade whose crops are being subjected to sustained, deadly aerial assaults financed by the US government through DynCorp.   * ExxonMobil: IRAdvocates filed an ATCA claim against ExxonMobil in June 2001 on behalf of villagers from Aceh, Indonesia, who accuse the oil giant of paying and directing Indonesian security forces. The plaintiffs claim that these forces committed atrocities including murder, torture, crimes against humanity, sexual violence, and kidnapping in the course of protecting the company''s liquefied natural gas facilities.   * Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill: IRAdvocates filed suit in July 2005 against Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill companies on behalf of Malian former child slaves, who were trafficked from Mali into Cote d’Ivoire and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings.   * Occidental Petroleum: In April 2003, ILRF and the Center for Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, against Occidental Petroleum and its security contractor, Airscan, Inc., for their role in the murder of innocent civilians in the hamlet of Santo Domingo, Colombia in 1998.   * Wal-Mart: A suit was filed in September 2005 on behalf of workers from four continents for massive, systematic wage and hour violations. Workers from China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Swaziland, and Nicaragua joined together to press their common class claims that Wal-Mart knowingly uses suppliers that systematically deprive workers of the basic provisions of Wal-Mart’s code of conduct.   IRAdvocates understands that its present litigation strategy, based on ATCA in US courts, has limits and for that reason we are developing new theories to use in US courts and in the courts of other nations. Through this new work we hope to contribute to opening new avenues toward accountability for human rights violations.   The Case of UNOCAL   Since mid-1997, the attorneys at IRAdvocates have served as lead counsel in a lawsuit brought in Los Angeles by numerous individuals who were conscripted into unpaid forced labor to build a pipeline for Unocal together in a joint venture with the military regime of Burma, SLORC. Visit the related web page
	Senate Report says top officials set tone for detainee abuse by CS Monitor / AP / Human Rights First USA   April 22, 2009   Learning from our tortured past. (Human Rights First)   This morning the Senate Armed Services Committee released an unprecedented report on detainee treatment. Never before has the U.S. government so explicitly acknowledged the damage that torture and cruel detainee treatment have done to our country and its security.   President Obama must open a nonpartisan inquiry on torture to get the full truth. Why is this inquiry so urgently needed? For the sake of the country"s principles and its national security, the U.S. government must learn from past mistakes to make sure they don"t happen again. The Senate report itself concludes that our past use of torture and other harsh interrogation "complicates our ability to attract allies to our side, strengthens the hand of our enemies, and reduces our ability to collect intelligence that can save lives."   We at Human Rights First are urging an independent inquiry to help evaluate the full cost of abuses, examine how we got there, and come up with safeguards so we don"t repeat the same mistakes. The U.S. needs to invest in a forward-looking strategy on intelligence gathering that gives interrogators training and guidance on which techniques work, and which techniques – such as torture - don"t. To get to that point, we need to fully explore our past wrongdoing.   The bottom line is that we deserve to know the truth. And our security relies on it.   Join our efforts today to urge President Obama to not only end torture now, but make sure we don"t ever torture again by signing the petition below.   April 22, 2009   Senate Report says top officials set tone for detainee abuse, by Gail Russell Chaddock. (CS Monitor)   Abusive interrogation techniques in Abu Ghraib followed approval of their use in Guantánamo, says a report by Senate Armed Services Committee.   Senior US officials, not rogue underlings, were responsible for the abusive treatment of detainees in US custody. That’s the bottom line of a newly declassified, bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday night.   “The record established by the committee’s investigation shows that senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, in a statement Tuesday night.   “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses,” he added.   Senator Levin has asked the Justice Department to launch a process “to establish accountability of high-level officials, including lawyers.”   The 18-month inquiry was approved unanimously by the Armed Services panel in November 2008, but it could not be released until vetted by the Pentagon. Some phrases and paragraphs in the 232-page report are still blacked out, but the panel is negotiating release of the remaining redacted material.   In a narrative that reads like a film script, the report documents how coercive methods used by Chinese communists to elicit false confessions from American POWs during the Korean War made it into interrogation rooms for detainees in US custody.   A key element was the redefining of the legal framework for the treatment of detainees after the 9/11 attacks. Drawing on more than 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents, the report tracks a legal paper trail and its consequences on the ground.   Policy changes came from the top and set a tone for the abuses on the ground that followed, the report concludes.   “Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, waterboarding and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO [Guantánamo Bay],” the report said.   The narrative starts with President Bush’s Feb. 7, 2002, declaration that the Third Geneva Convention – which sets international standards for the treatment of POWs – did not apply to Al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. The statement included the caveat that the US armed forces shall “continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Convention.”   But interviewees said the standard was subjective and tough to apply in the field.   “The decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in US custody,” the report concludes.   High-level policy statements authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques and the influence of training techniques from the US military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program – banned on paper for use in US military interrogations but not in practice – also eroded standards of humane treatment.   “The use of techniques similar to those used in SERE resistance training – such as stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, and treating them like animals – was at odds with the commitment to humane treatment of detainees in US custody,” the report concludes.   The report’s findings contrast with the Pentagon’s initial response to the gritty images coming out of Abu Ghraib in 2004, which was to blame the grunts.   The Armed Services Committee report finds that there were in fact systemic abuses, and those responsible for them have yet to be sanctioned. It’s a conclusion the Pentagon disputes. Since 2001, the Pentagon has conducted more than a dozen internal investigations into detainee mistreatment that have resulted in some 430 disciplinary actions, ranging from prison sentences and bad-conduct discharges to forfeiture of pay and allowances.   The Armed Services panel is calling for higher-level accountability. “The abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own,” the report says. Visit the related web page
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