In the News

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2014 (IPS) – Hundreds of Liberians have filed a complaint accusing a U.S. government agency of failure to carry out due diligence or ensure that safeguards were followed for investments made to a failed biomass project in Liberia.

The fast approaching January 6th deadline for applications for the Echoing Green Fellowship, which awards the founders of socially innovative organizations up to $90,000 in funding, prompts me to wonder: Are we actually thwarting potential by putting too much stock in the individual, as opposed to rewarding collaborative forms leadership?

KHANBOGD, Mongolia – Though it is well before noon, the hot light of the South Gobi desert sun punches through the ventilation openings at the peak of Byambasuren’s white ger. The door of her teepee-like home, a single round room built of felt and canvas, is open to a dirt compound surrounded by a fence made of rough-cut wood. Beyond that, cattle and horses churn a small grid of unpaved streets to powder. Herders on foot follow behind, their features obscure in yellow clouds of dust. Byambasuren’s ger lies 700 kilometers (434 miles) from Ulaanbataar, Mongolia’s capital. The trip overland is mostly on hard-packed dirt roads and takes 15 hours across treeless steppes and sand. Much of the world’s second largest desert remains remote from the world, even forbidding. That is not the case for Byambasuren, a young herder and mother, or for Khanbogd, an expanding livestock and desert town in Omnogovi, Mongolia’s largest province, which lies along the border with China.

KHAN BOGH, Mongolia — “And this,” says Battsengel Lkhamdoorov, a South Gobi herder who once managed 600 animals, “is our new spring.” Laughing, he lifted the lid of a brown steel box, its hard lines unusual in a landscape of layered sand and rounded clouds. The tank rests on four metal legs, contains about 1,000 gallons of water, is filled twice a week, and is small enough to fit in the bed of a pickup. It’s located along the south fence guarding the 80-square-kilometer Oyu Tolgoi hard rock copper, gold, and molybdenum mine.

Since founding Accountability Counsel nearly four years ago, we have been working to ensure that communities around the world have “access to nonjudicial remedy” to address conflicts with corporations. After years working as a human rights and environmental litigator, I started Accountability Counsel out of the belief that courts are not always the best venues to address such conflicts. Litigation is not an option for many of our clients, who face barriers to accessing courts that include corruption, financial hurdles, and the need for immediate action to address harms. Insufficient laws addressing corporate accountability are an impediment as well, made more so with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. And even when litigation is an option, nonjudicial mechanisms can sometimes prove a more effective route in resolving disputes.

It’s enough to give you whiplash. Last month, the World Bank put out a devastating new report on why 4 degrees Celsius of global warming “simply must not be allowed to occur.” This month, the Bank is considering whether to provide financing for a new coal-fired power plant in Mongolia. The World Bank Group’s private funding arm, International Finance Corporation, is considering support for the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine project in the South Gobi Desert, a project that also includes a 750 megawatt coal plant. Read the full article here.

The Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in the southern Gobi desert in Mongolia has become a symbol of a looming crisis: a limited water supply that could be exhausted within a decade, seriously threatening the lives and livelihoods of the local population.

Informes de la Secretaría de Ambiente y de la Alcaldía Local de Fontibón revelan aumento de ruido en la localidad. Los vecinos aseguran que la ampliación del aeropuerto los ha perjudicado.

Mirage-like, a slinky piece of asphalt appears on the horizon after hours of driving across the dusty Gobi Desert. What’s coming into sight is the only paved surface for miles around. Yet many trucks are driving alongside the new highway, not on it.

Accountability Counsel’s Executive Director, Natalie Bridgeman Fields, was featured in the July 2012 edition of Elle Magazine. Elle presented Natalie with a ‘Genius Award’ for her work with Accountability Counsel. Natalie shares this award with the staff, Law Fellows, interns, pro bono lawyers, donors and supporters who make Accountability Counsel’s work possible.

In the past decade, Mongolia’s South Gobi Desert has experienced an enormous mining boom. In 2000, we had only a couple of large active mines. Today, there are dozens of large-scale mines with many more being planned. I formed a research team with members of the communities being affected by two particular developments: Oyu Tolgoi mine, a US$12bn project owned and operated by Rio Tinto and funded by the World Bank among other organisations, Mongolia’s largest ever foreign direct investment, and Tayan Nuur iron mine, in south-western Mongolia, which is being financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Together we interviewed 100 people, most of whom have spent their entire lives as nomadic herders until recently, while others were residents of the local towns or staff at the local government office.

Tuxtepec, Oaxaca.- Durante los últimos ocho meses el tema de la hidroeléctrica ha sido tema central de muchas discusiones. Existen los personajes evidentes: las comunidades y la empresa interesada en realizar una inversión de 60 millones de dólares y la parte gubernamental integrada por diputados, senador y dependencias federales.

This month, an Ecuadorian court handed down one of the largest environmental awards in history, ordering Chevron to pay US$9.5 billion in connection with Amazon oilfield pollution. The Feb. 14 court ruling, issued in the ramshackle oil town of Lago Agrio, clearly marks a major milestone in the 17-year-old case and, more broadly, in litigation concerning the conduct of multinational oil companies in the developing world.

Tuxtepec, Oax.- La noche del pasado viernes durante la rueda de prensa con los diputados locales, El Profesor investigador del Centro de Investigación de Estudios Superiores y Antropología Social Ciesas: Guillermo Padilla Rudeano, habló sobre la problemática en torno a la obra hidroeléctrica en Cerro de Oro.

En la primera semana de enero de este turbulento año que comienza, las comunidades chinantecas de Paso Canoa y Santa Úrsula, en el estado de Oaxaca, recibieron la visita de un grupo de investigadores estadunidenses, pertenecientes a la Corporación Privada de Inversión en el Exterior (OPIC, por sus siglas en inglés), una agencia del gobierno de Estados Unidos que proporciona financiamiento internacional. Estaban ahí para investigar actos violatorios de los derechos humanos y de los pueblos indígenas, según la denuncia que desde el día 30 de noviembre del año pasado representantes de esas comunidades presentaron ante dicha organización.

Natalie Bridgeman Fields is not afraid of the courtroom – through her own law practice, she is co-lead counsel representing the nonprofit Amazon Watch and a group of Peru’s indigenous Achuar residents in a tort case against Occidental Petroleum Corp. She’s also local counsel for the Yale National Litigation Project, representing convicted terrorist Jose Padilla in his constitutional claims against former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo. But Fields has seen her greatest impact outside of court as a leader in using nonjudicial remedies to help communities affected by large-scale development projects.