Each year, international financial institutions (IFIs) provide governments and companies billions of dollars to undertake development projects. Ostensibly, the projects are aimed at improving the welfare of community members through better education and roads, improved health care and governance, and greater access to water and energy. Some projects are also responsible for severe environmental degradation and egregious human rights violations. Many of the largest institutions—the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American, Asian and Africa Development Banks, and the United States’ Overseas Private Investment Corporation—have created accountability mechanisms to ensure that the projects are developed and implemented in accordance with environmental, labor, and human rights policy. The clinic has worked with partners in a variety of contexts to hold corporations to account when their activities threaten the human rights of local communities.
Complicity with Human Rights Violations in the Middle East and North Africa.
In spring 2009, the clinic investigated potential legal avenues for holding several multinational corporations responsible for complicity in human rights violations in a country in the Middle East/Northeast Africa region in collaboration with the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). Students investigated whether the companies played roles in specific incidents and analyzed complex, intertwined issues of corporate and human rights law. They briefed GI-Net staff and detailed their findings in five legal memoranda.