Glass Half Full? New Report Finds Development Banks Can Do More To Protect Communities' Rights

Development finance institutions (DFIs) that operate on global and regional levels play a significant role in protecting the human rights of indigenous peoples and local communities. That is due in large part to the fact that DFIs finance infrastructure, extractive, and other development projects that can have major impacts on communities. Financing of development in this context can be viewed as three sides of a triangle made up of (1) the DFI that supplies the financing for a project, (2) the borrowing client that implements the project, and (3) the independent accountability mechanism (IAM) of the DFI that exists to hear complaints related to the impacts caused by the project. How well are DFIs playing their role?

'Glass Half Full?: The State of Accountability in Development Finance' is a new report written by 11 organizations, including Natural Justice, that aims to answer that question. Using the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a framework, the report finds that even though complainants are undoubtedly better off than they would be in the absence of any complaint procedure, the outcome rarely provides adequate remedy for the harm caused by development projects.

This is the result of several factors, including the DFIs themselves, who undermine the effectiveness of the IAMs by failing to require their clients to disclose the IAM's existence to project-affected people and limiting the IAMs' mandates by stopping short of allowing them to issue binding decisions. Rather, the outcome depends either on the willingness of the DFI's client to resolve the conflict through dialogue or the DFI's own willingness to address the violations found through an IAM investigation. The report concludes with two sets of recommendations. The first set seeks to improve the current system by identifying best practices that should be adopted by all IAMs and DFIs. The report determines, however, that simply adopting best practices will not be enough to ensure that complainants receive remedy for the harms that have occurred. Rather, a new accountability system must be established as a matter of urgency with mechanisms that are empowered to make binding decisions and DFIs that no longer claim immunity in national courts.

To read the complete report visit: http://grievancemechanisms.org/resources/brochures/glass-half-full

Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa - High Ambitions, High Risks

Across the continent, it has been estimated that infrastructure inefficiencies cost billions of dollars annually, stunting African GDP growth. As a response, improving infrastructure across the continent is now regarded as a continental priority.

On 25 and 26 August, Stephanie Booker of Natural Justice attended the launch of the report "Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa - High Ambitions, High Risks".

The Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa, or PIDA, is the scaling up of infrastructure development across the continent, incorporating the New Economic Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the Infrastructure Master Plan of the African Union (AU) "in a single, inter-regional, and overarching framework for infrastructure development in Africa". PIDA is regarded as a strategic framework until 2040 in order to develop cross-border infrastructure in four key areas (energy, transport, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and trans-boundary water resources. 

Natural Justice Attends Side Event During UN GA on the Role, Protection and Effective Participation of Human Rights Defenders in Development

On 29 October 2013, Eli Makagon attended a side-event held by the International Service for Human Rights at United Nations headquarters in New York. The side-event, held during the UN's ongoing 68th General Assembly meeting, was entitled The Role, Protection and Effective Participation of Human Rights Defenders in Development, and brought together panelists, including Margaret Sekaggya, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders and Pavel Sulyandziga, Chair of the UN Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, to discuss the issues. The panelists noted that very often, human rights defenders are people from Indigenous and local communities who are facing threats from large scale development. Among other things, Mr. Sulyandziga noted that international financial institutions such as the World Bank Group are an important factor in ensuring that the rights of Indigenous peoples are respected, as many of the major corporations involved in development are attempting to obtain loans from those institutions. Ms. Sekaggya reported that there were some positive developments, such as Australia's mining assessment initiatives and Columbia's national hydrocarbon agency assessment, as well as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (link).

Blog Post on Conservation and Human Rights

From its origins in seeking to protect disappearing wildlife at the behest of big-game hunters, conservation has evolved unpredictably and substantively over the past century. With a firm conviction that the practice of conservation, to paraphrase Dr Martin Luther King Jr, is long but ‘bending toward justice’, Dr Kent Redford recently traced the developments in conservation practices and the increasing emphasis on the need to incorporate human rights discourses and practices into conservation in a blog post for Just Conservation.

According to Dr Redford, “change also came about at the turn of the last century because of the issue of justice. The arc of conservation was bending with the realization that our moral argument for the value of conserving biodiversity was seriously flawed if we ourselves were acting immorally towards people. Seeking one justice did not justify abrogating another. So conservation entered the period of accommodation, of self-examination, and of change. It was clear that we needed to seriously consider how our actions, taken in pursuit of conservation goals, affected the rights of the people impacted by those actions.” 

Find the full blog post here.