UPDATE: this post previously mentioned Shell as one of the companies International Alert is advising on the potential consequences of their programming in countries like Iraq. Shell is one of many companies that International Alert is advising. Also, the information on “costs” comes from a document called Red Flags: Liability Risks for Companies Operating in High Risk zones (Warning: PDF link).
I’m at the 2nd Hull Peace Conference (Warning: PDF link) where Aurelien Tobie from International Alert just finished his talk on the training and skills required for “Peacebuilding”. An interesting anecdote came when I asked him about lobbying, and how the organisation would like to influence Governments and policy makers.
International Alert works with a variety of Non-Governmental Organisations and corporations across the world’s hotspots, including a variety of large international corporations. Some of these companies apparently want to go back to Iraq, which is an extremely dangerous area to get involved in. Inevitably a corporate presence there would result in deaths, due to the grave security risk out there.
Instead of telling these companies that it’s wrong to engage there because your presence will result in killings because of the security they’d have to employ, they tell them that it would cost them a lot of money if their presence did result in killings. They often cite cases where corporations have been successfully sued in similar scenarios, which has far more impact on the corporations than mere threats that human beings might die.
Business ethics? Pah!
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