2009

Last Tuesday, as a result of the trial against the former Liberian President and warlord Charles Taylor, Fatal Transactions International Coordinator Anneke Galama spoke out against blood diamonds and Zimbabwe in the media.

From tomorrow June 23 (until Thursday June 25) the annual intercessional meeting of the Kimberley Process will take place in Windhoek, Namibia. At the dawn of this meeting, Fatal Transactions has co-signed a press release warning that the Kimberley Process is potentially failing its objectives. The coalition of civil society groups has said that despite having all the tools in place, the scheme was failing to address effectively issues of non-compliance, smuggling, money laundering and human rights abuses in the world’s alluvial diamond fields.

The Institute of International Studies (University of Wroclaw) and Fatal Transactions are pleased to announce the Winter School on "China in Africa: challenges and opportunities" for students from countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The Winterschool will take place 14-19 December, 2009. This is a second edition of the Fatal Transactions workshop.

The final report of the expert meeting 'Fragile States and the Resource Curse' that Fatal Transactions member NiZA hosted together with Cordaid is available now. The report contains an introduction to the topics discussed and the aims of the expert meeting. Furthermore, it holds summaries of the presentations and concludes with a set of recommendations.

The two-day conference ‘China's quest for African resources: the new scramble or strategic partnership?’ will take place from 14-15 December at Wroclaw University, Poland. It will explore various issues concerning the growing engagement of China in Africa with regards to natural resources. The conference is organised by the Institute of International Studies of Wroclaw University (Poland) in cooperation with Fatal Transactions.

In its latest report IPIS investigates Belgian traders in the mineral business of eastern DRC in the light of accusations formulated in a report of the UN Panel of Experts of December 2008. The UN Panel asserted that, through certain suppliers (comptoirs), traders knowingly purchased minerals from mines controlled by non-state armed groups such as the FDLR.

On 21-22 November 2008 the annual Fatal Transactions conference was held in Bonn. The conference was hosted by Fatal Transactions member BICC and offered a platform for analysing the current status quo of resource extraction in (potential) conflict areas. The conference report is available now.

Fatal Transactions has urged the EU to stop European Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) from profiting at the expense of human rights at a public hearing on 16 April 2009 of the Parliamentary Commitee on Human Rights of the EU. Fatal Transactions, together with the ECCJ, the Jesuit European Office, CAFOD and Global Witness, provided a Briefing Note to the Hearing with strong recommendations to end corporate abuse of European companies outside the EU, including those extracting the natural resources of Africa.

On 14 March 1200 signatures of the Clean Call for Congo were handed to Mike Loch (Motorola & GeSI) who is a representative of the electronics industry. During the handover, the public blew symbolically 1200 soap bubbles to clean their ‘dirty’ mobile phones, which might have been produced using conflict resources from Eastern Congo, such as coltan and caasiterite.

Niza / Fatal Transactions, in collaboration with the Dutch NGO Cordaid has published a position paper on the Dutch fragile states policy on fragile state. The paper was used by the Dutch socialist party (SP) to formulate parliamentary questions to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In this paper, Niza and Cordaid stress the role of natural resources as being one of the main causes for instability in African countries.