With the WEF‘s Davos 2011 meeting in the bag, lots of corporate and governmental leaders will be going home feeling a lot better about themselves… except for the two winners of the Public Eye Awards 2011. But before that announcement, if you don’t know what the Public Eye Awards are, check our previous post on the PEA11.
So without further ado, the winners of the Public Eye Awards 2011 are:(drum roll)
In the Public Award category (voted for by the general public): They are destroying natural habitats all over the world, replacing them with massive plantations of Palm for Palm Oil extraction, and doing so under the misleading banner of “biofuel”, ladies and gentlemen, Neste Oil!
And winner of the Global Award (voted by a panel of judges): They own your land, they make slaves of your family, they extract resources for corporate and personal gain; boys and girls, slaves of the system, I give you AngloGold Ashanti!
Our congratulations goes to both winners. Unfortunately the two companies were reluctant to accept their awards in person and have rather opted for the “make like it never happened” strategy. You can remind them about it by sending them a congratulations here: NesteOil and AngloGold Ashanti.
Read the press release from the Public Eye Awards below:
Neste Oil and AngloGold in the Public Eye Pillory in Davos
Within sight of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Berne Declaration (BD) and Greenpeace today denounced the particularly flagrant human rights abuses and environmental sins committed by corporations. The jury-selected Global Award was presented to the South African mining company AngloGold/Ashanti. The People’s Award, determined by Internet voting, went to the Finnish agrofuel concern Neste Oil. Over 50,000 people took part in the online voting. Also during the press conference, OpenLeaks co-founder Daniel Domscheit-Berg called for more transparency and ethics from the business world.
With the 2011 Public Eye Awards, BD and Greenpeace “reward” two corporations that exemplify those WEF members and enterprises whose social and environmental offenses expose the flip side of purely profit-oriented globalization. For the contamination of land and poisoning of people from gold mining in Ghana, the South African mining corporation AngloGold/Ashanti receives the jury-selected Public Eye Global Award. In his laudatory address in Davos, Daniel Owusu-Koranteng, President of the nominating organization WACAM, told of mining waste that contaminates rivers and wells, from which entire villages must drink. In addition, local residents were occasionally tortured in the company’s guard house; some cases resulted in fatalities.
For the Web-based Public Eye People’s Award, mobilizing more than twice as many voters this year as in 2010, Neste Oil cleaned up with 17’385 votes, thus relegating BP (13’000) and Philip Morris (8’052) to runners-up. The Finnish biofuel producer – and soon the world’s largest palm oil purchaser – sells bio-diesel Europe-wide under the shameless name “Green Diesel.” The huge jump in demand for palm oil fuels rain forest destruction in Indonesia and Malaysia, threatening the remaining refuges of the already endangered orangutan.
With the looming “shame award” on the horizon, Finnair has attempted to distance itself at the last minute from a planned major project with Neste kerosene.
The sponsoring and nominating organizations of the Public Eye Awards have long been calling on governments to implement legally-binding rules for more corporate responsibility. Therefore civil society welcomes the framework outlined by John Ruggie, U.N. Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, that calls for state protection, corporate respect, and legal help for victims, and which will be adopted by the Human Rights Council in mid-2011. According to Ruggie, only through systematic “knowing and showing” will corporations be able to avoid future cases of public “naming and shaming” like that meted out by the Public Eye.
The co-founder of the OpenLeaks project, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, would also like to see more transparency and ethics in corporations. “Both meet a fast-growing societal need,” says the former WikiLeaks spokesperson. In the success of digital whistle-blowing, Domscheit-Berg sees “a powerful signal to the business world: Those who do not proactively establish transparency top-down, run an increased risk that it will be created, bottom-up, by whistle-blowers.”
Further information at www.publiceye.ch or from:
Oliver Classen, The Berne Declaration, Tel. +41 44 277 70 06 (redirected), oliver.classen@evb.ch
Bruno Heinzer, Greenpeace, +41 79 400 88 31, bheinzer@ch.greenpeace.org
Let’s keep the spirit of Public Eye going by holding more local companies accountable for their actions!
Urban Guerilla 