Corporate Responsibility for Preventing Human Rights Abuses in Conflict Areas

Abstract

The majority of the violent conflicts during the past fifty years have been intra-state civil wars or armed rebellions, and in a significant number of cases such conflicts have been driven at least in part by revenues derived from natural resources such as oil or minerals. In countries such as Angola, Burma, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sudan, governments or armed rebel groups have financed wars by revenues derived from gas and oil exploitation, and by black market diamonds and other minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone. When such conflicts erupt, corporations with legitimate business interests in the country often find that their reputations have been damaged through their association with the human rights abuses that accompany such conflicts. Company equipment and facilities have been used on some occasions by security forces to commit human rights violations, and revenues derived from their business operations have supported corrupt authoritarian regimes that systematically violate the human rights of their own citizens. The role of corporations, particularly transnational corporations (TNCs) in the oil and gas and mining industries, in relation to the causes of civil conflict, and their possible role in preventing and managing such conflicts, have recently become subjects of intense interest and controversy.