Corporate Foreign Policy

During our last trip to Kenya on the Georges Tadonki trial, I had the opportunity to develop an association with the lawyer Evans Monari of Daly & Figgis Advocates (photo - center), who is one of the best known business and human rights lawyers in East Africa.  Below is an article Evans has contributed for the RobertAmsterdam.com blog, and it is a great pleasure and honor to re-post here at CFP and feature these perspectives from such a unique and valuable voice from this region.

TEN REASONS WHY KENYA SHOULD VOTE “YES”

By Evans Monari

All indications point to the proposed constitution being approved by majority of the voters. And here are just ten reasons, why we in Kenya should approve the document and maybe convince the persons still opposing the document.

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During one of his interminable appearances on national television, perhaps even on his own broadcast Alo Presidente on Telesur, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez demanded to know last month why Guillermo Zuloaga, the majority owner of Venezuela’s last remaining opposition television station, was not in jail. “How is it possible that he can accuse me of such things and walk free?” the strongman demanded.

Terse words, made all the more intimidating by the idea that this is a clear and tangible promise more than a threat.

The answer is fairly simple, according to the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl: Zuloaga’s statements about Chávez were hardly criminal, and years of government investigations had turned up nothing else prosecutors could plausibly use against him. But that, of course, was not the response of Chavez’s henchmen. Within days of the broadcast, an investigation against the businessman that had been abandoned was reopened; charges were filed. On June 11, a judge ordered Zuloaga arrested and confined to one of the country’s high-security prisons.

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In an insightful new analysis, two Harvard professors have revealed why the corporate sector plugging ‘institutional‘ gaps in societies can lead to economic prosperity for both the companies and the nations in which they invest.

The value of social investments in emerging markets and why western companies looking to expand should consider making it a core instrument of their business plans is tackled in the latest book by Harvard Business School professors Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu, “Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road Map for Strategy and Execution“.

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The Christian Science Monitor reports that the first of Zimbabwe’s new independent newspapers could be on the streets as early as this Sunday after media groups were finally granted licenses last week.

Sixteen months after the launch of the power-sharing government, the Zimbabwe Media Commission gave five groups permission to operate. Its action came after months of lobbying by journalists, publishing companies, and from within Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Until last week, the MDC’s partner in government, ZANU-PF, (the party of President Robert Mugabe), had been reluctant to allow potentially hostile new publications to appear on the streets, challenging the state-supported Herald’s dominance. Pressure for the move came from South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma, who is the official mediator between the two parties.

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The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart has written an intriguingarticle on the proposed law in Uganda that would criminalize homosexuality, an issue this blogger has discussed here on the blog and in conversations with one of the leading international opposers to the bill, British MP Peter Tatchell. A commission created by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has recommended that the legislation be withdrawn. According to Mr. Capehart, “all the international outrage that the horrific bill whipped up is having an effect.”

Ugandan lawmaker Adolf Mwesige led the commission and, according to the New York Times, “said that virtually all clauses in the legislation were either unconstitutional or redundant, and that any other clauses should be placed in another bill dealing generally with sexual offenses.” Mwesige told the paper, “If we proceeded, it would definitely provoke criticism, and rightly so.”

Indeed, international outrage and criticism from human rights groups and objections from major donors like Sweden, prompted the Kampala government to be wary of the bill. In mid-January Museveni issued a statement distancing himself from the bill. He appointed a cabinet committee to review the bill. On May 7, the committeerecommended that the bill be withdrawn.

The committee’s report found that the bill has “technical defects in form and content” and that many of the clauses are either unconstitutional or redundant of existing laws. Furthermore, the committee recommends deflecting negative attention away from the bill by changing its title or combining it with Uganda’s existing law, the Sexual Offenses Act.

Only Clause 13 of the anti-gay bill — which addresses the promotion of homosexuality — “was worthy of consideration,” according to the report.

The bill won’t be dead until it is officially dropped or voted down by the Ugandan parliament. This is expected to happen within weeks, Mwesige told the Times.

We certainly agree with Mr. Capehart that “it’s sad and enraging that a bill so hateful, so backward, so wrong came so close to becoming law.”

The treasurer general of Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Roy Bennett, a longtime opponent of President Robert Mugabe, was acquitted yesterday of all charges, including terrorism, his lawyer said.

Judge Chinembiri Bhunu found Bennett not guilty of all charges: banditry, sabotage, terrorism and insurgency.

“He is now a free man,” lawyer Trust Maanda said. Bennett could have faced the death penalty.

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Jamestown Foundation correspondent Giorgi Kvelashvili below discussesthe de-Sovietization of Georgia, its progress based on the work and recent writings of President Saakashvili. Though the unorthodox relationship with Russia has hindered the mechanisms of autonomy in the post-Soviet state, the boom we  begin to see with respect to police reform, a crucial element to ongoing civil discourse, is cause for hope.

In his April 15, 2010 article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili wrote about the significant progress his country has made in nation-building and consolidation of a liberal democracy.

In the piece entitled “Failed No Longer,” Saakashvili touched upon almost all aspects of Georgia’s internal development, foreign policy priorities, security issues, international engagement and, of course, the hurdles erected by Russia’s current leadership to obstruct Georgia’s freedom of choice.

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For almost a decade, the US, EU, UK, Canada and Australia have imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, for a continued lack of democratic progression occurring from the former breadbasket of Africa.

Only recently have we seen the beginnings of perhaps a sustainable institutional infrastructure, ushered in by Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. On April 21 Mr. Tsvangirai, will travel to Brussels to ask the EU to lift the sanctions it has imposed on his country. With the end of 2009 bringing a true arrest to cholera (below the international threshold), with the shrewd workings of Finance Minister and MDC representative Mr. Biti bringing hyperinflation to a near-close, if the west is indeed concerned with supporting continued democracy in Zimbabwe, it must heed Tsvangirai’s request.

Co-founder of Urtak.com and Guardian opinion editorial columnist Marc Lizoainhas written a unique and compelling argument for the lifting of these sanctions, one certainly worthy of publication on our site. Dialogue on this controversial initiative would be greatly appreciated.

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More than a hundred British Members of Parliament have condemned Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which could equate to the death penalty for those Ugandans who engage in homosexual acts.

The 118 MPs have signed what is known as an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the UK Parliament, urging the scrapping of the Bill.

The EDM, drafted by east London Labour MP Harry Cohen and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, urges the Ugandan government to “uphold international humanitarian law by abandoning the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, decriminalising same-sex acts between consenting adults in private, and outlawing discrimination against gay people”.

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Claudio Gatti is an investigative reporter based in New York for the Italian newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore and The International Herald Tribune. Below, he references the ongoing tangle of investigations regarding possible bribes paid by the conglomerate to secure contracts around the world, the ramifications from the responses from the respective judicial systems which processed the newfound criminals, and the geopolitical fallout from their sentences.

Some cases go back years, while others are still being investigated and prosecuted. Unexpectedly severe jail sentences of seven to 14 years for four Rio Tinto employees charged with taking bribes and stealing commercial secrets could augur tougher times for foreign companies and errant executives in China’s unruly business world. And now, Mr. Gatti reports that a recent case in Italy resulted in guilty pleas from four Alstom executives and two Alstom business units, as well as fines.

In addition, the fraud division of the Justice Department is looking into the possibility that the Italian case — which involved bribes paid by Alstom for a contract awarded by a division of the state-controlled utility Enel — was one of several incidents in which Alstom Power Inc., an American subsidiary, improperly used agents to acquire contracts around the world, according to investigators who did not want to be identified because the inquiry was not yet public.

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