Blog

Members of FPIC and Rights Forum, a network of Indigenous and local communities who have been affected by the development of a transmission line project in Lamjung District, Nepal, demand that the European Investment Bank stop turning a blind eye to human rights violations associated with the project and follow through with its commitments on protection and sustainable development.

Nearly one out of five of all complaints filed to accountability offices raise issues related to livelihoods. We use two separate coal power plants based in Gujarat, India and Bargny, Senegal as case studies of how communities fight for the restoration of their livelihoods.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Indian fishing communities who sued the International Finance Corporation over environmental and livelihood damage caused by an IFC-financed coal power plant. While the Supreme Court’s decision means that the communities’ legal case in the United States may be over, it does not mean that the IFC can walk away from its responsibility to ensure that harms to this community – and other communities impacted by IFC financing – are effectively remediated.

Dispute resolution processes can be an opportunity for communities to reach creative solutions to the harm they are facing from development projects. But how often do they result in agreements, and how often do these agreements result in real remedy?

Tanzania’s pledge to adopt guidelines to ensure that schools ensure adolescent mothers can return to schools by June 2022 is an important turning point for girls’ education, Human Rights Watch and Accountability Counsel said today. On March 8, the Tanzanian government and the World Bank had published their agreement to restructure Tanzania’s Secondary Education Quality Improvement Program (SEQUIP), financed by a US$500 million loan from the World Bank, to adopt new measures to effectively end a school ban against students who are pregnant or are mothers.

This month, Congress passed its fiscal year 2022 legislation to fund the government, and in passing this legislation included a call to strengthen accountability for the U.S. government’s development activities abroad. We are pleased to see several of the recommendations that we submitted during the appropriations process incorporated in the explanatory statement and House report accompanying the legislation.

It takes an average of two years for a complaint to produce outputs. What takes so much time, and how long is too long?

On February 23, in response to a set of recommendations on “Corporate Due Diligence and Corporate Accountability” adopted by the European Union Parliament a year prior, the European Commission released a proposal for an EU-wide directive on “Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence.” The primary objective of the proposal is to impose due diligence requirements on EU companies to prevent and respond to environmental and social harm. One of the due diligence requirements in the European Commission’s proposal is for companies that meet size and financial turnover prerequisites to establish complaints procedures; investors and accountability advocates alike should embrace this directive.

Accessibility is one of the key criteria for an effective accountability mechanism, but people can’t access a mechanism they don’t know exists. Too often, communities harmed by international development finance are not informed about the accountability mechanisms available to address their grievances. One simple but significant way to make accountability…

One in ten complaints meet all eligibility criteria to advance to a substantive stage, but never do. What happens to them?

On February 1, 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published an advance version of Remedy in Development Finance: Guidance and Practice (and launched a final version on February 23*), an expansive and in-depth look at whether development finance institutions (“DFIs”) remedy environmental and…

In 2018, we shared groundbreaking news that communities we support in Haiti had reached an historic agreement to remedy harm. After three years of implementation, we are sharing an update tracking both the significant gains and the challenges still to be overcome to ensure that the agreement on paper leads to meaningful changes for the families who were harmed.

The Good Policy Paper, launched today, assesses current policy provisions at independent accountability mechanisms, identifying best practices and areas for improvement.

Using the advanced filters, we dig through complaint data to get a sense of what the state of accountability in international finance looks like – from near and far.

On November 24 and 25th, Accountability Counsel joined the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability (ACCA) at their 2021 General Assembly (GA) in Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo.

The Internationale Klimaschutzinitiative (IKI), a climate finance instrument of the German Ministry of the Environment, is establishing an independent Complaint Mechanism (CM). Accountability Counsel welcomes the new mechanism and has been pleased to participate in a consultation process on its procedures. Our case experience has demonstrated that even with the…

Two projects of Myrinivskyi Hliboprodukt (MHP), a Ukrainian industrial agribusiness company, financed by the EBRD will be assessed for a compliance review by the bank’s Independent Project Accountability Mechanism (IPAM). Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) of the IFC is expected to begin a similar process in the coming weeks to assess the need for a full investigation into the IFC’s financing to MHP.

Australia’s ANZ Bank today launched a Grievance Mechanism Framework to evaluate and respond to human rights related complaints associated with its corporate lending customers. This precedent-setting move makes ANZ the first large commercial bank in the world to adopt a human rights policy that gives communities harmed by ANZ-financed projects a…

Accountability Counsel exists to hold international investors accountable for their impact on people and planet. Every day, we demand from those in power transparency, meaningful consultation, decision-making processes that prioritize the wellbeing of those who are most impacted, equitable compensation and benefit-sharing, and effective channels for feedback. Our legitimacy in…

With the World Bank Board’s approval, the Lubigi drainage channel case will be the first to go to the World Bank’s new Dispute Resolution Service, a recently created arm of the Bank’s accountability office that gives requesters and the borrower the opportunity to resolve concerns through a voluntary dialogue process.