Global Witness - Work

Work

Global Witness has worked on diamonds, oil, timber, cocoa, gas, gold and other minerals. It has undertaken investigations and case studies in Cambodia, Angola, Liberia, DR Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, Burma, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan and Ivory Coast. It has also helped to set up international initiatives such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Kimberley Process, and the Publish What You Pay coalition.

The organization's first campaign involved work against the trade of illegal timber between Cambodia and Thailand which was funding the Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

Global Witness argues that natural resources can be, and have been, exploited to fund armies and militias who murder, rape and commit other human rights abuses against civilians. It says that "natural resources can potentially be used to negotiate and maintain peace" and "could be the key to ending Africa's poverty".

Read more about this topic:  Global Witness

Famous quotes containing the word work:

    “The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer’s life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”
    —Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)

    “To lift, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen,
    Are acts I recognize, with all they mean
    Of shepherding the unruly, for a kind of
    Controlled woolgathering is my work too.”
    —Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)

    “Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?”
    —Lucy Stone (1818–1893)