I was struck by a recent article on VietnamNetBridge here which noted how the Bong Mieu Gold Company’s mine in Quang Nam province was attacked by over 500 people from the surrounding villages.  According to the short article online, the incident started when a young man (aged 19) tried to sneak into the dumping ground to collect some ore.  He was handed over to local police by security guards and was then taken to hospital for injuries from an electric taser stick.  This sparked off more widespread unrest and the story notes that ‘hundreds of extremists used the case as a pretence to attack and rob five tons of ore from the Bong Mieu Gold Company’.  Vietnam is a country endowed with magnificent natural resources.  While the country has benefited from fast paced growth, prosperity is not even and a great deal of poverty is concentrated in rural and remote areas.  Vietnam has only recently opened up to foreign investment in the mining sector.   I was struck by this article and concerned that unless companies find meaningful ways to engage with the surrounding community and find ways to make sure that remote communities also prosper, I fear we will be seeing many more such stories in the future. Photo from VietnamNetBridge.

Rob Hanlon and I recently wrote an article in which we argued that the portrayal of Google as a defender of human rights for withdrawing from China is a theatrical performance (you can see the article here, and the follow up here). This morning I had an email from Salil Tripathi - Director of Policy at the Institute for Human Rights and Business - who pointed me to two pieces he's written from a more positive perspective on Google's withdrawal from China (you can see them here and here). Rob and I are not necessarily convinced by his argument, and we'll be following up with another article on this soon, but Salil's articles are interesting and worth a read.

One of the issues that concerns me about Google's response to our article (see the Google letter here) is the way in which the company accuses us of "gross[ly] misunderstanding ... Google’s actions and motives" but then fails to demonstrate what we misunderstood. Apart from repeating a handful of publicly available statements (e.g., they entered China with 'reservations', that they were not failing China, and so on), the statement does little to convince us that they are indeed the defenders of human rights some (including Salil) make them out to be. But more troubling, and an issue we will take up in an upcoming article, is the claim that (in response to our view that withdrawing from China and not, say, Vietnam, smacks of 'human rights opportunism' - or as we call it "Google Theatre") "a comparison with other countries would not be responsible".

Why would it not be responsible? Is there some sort of hierarchy of human rights abuses, where a company can determine not to do business in countries with the 'worst violations' but remain in countries with 'lesser violations'? Surely human rights are human rights, and there is no gradation that allows Google to say that comparing its actions in one country with another are not responsible.

It is also interesting to note that Google did not mention the term 'human rights' once in its response to our article. That in itself is perhaps more telling than anything else...

On 31 March, Rob Hanlon and I published an article in the CSR Asia Weekly called "Google Theatre" (you can download a pdf version here). In that article, we argued that "the portrayal of Google as a socially responsible business…is a theatrical performance". Obviously our view was critical of Google (and other companies gaining good publicity over their withdrawal from China on purported human rights grounds). We also took a swing at human rights groups (in particular Amnesty International and HRW) over their failure to make a strong case that human rights are a business responsibility. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre picked it up and sent it to all organisations named, and now has posted responses to our article from two of the organisations we criticised (Google and HRW), which you can read here.

Rob and I would be interested to hear from anybody on either our article or the responses from Google and HRW. Our contact details are on the article, and mine is on the website here (sfrost@csr-asia.com).

BTW: Rob is my former PhD student, and submitted his thesis last week. It is on CSR, human rights and corruption in China, Thailand and Cambodia. I hope that it's published soon because it's a fantastic piece of work!

Update (23 April): See updated story and links here.

In last week's CSR Asia Weekly, Rob Hanlon and I argued that "the portrayal of Google as a socially responsible business standing-up for human rights in China is a theatrical performance". Now comes news that Google said last week "Vietnamese computer users have been spied on and political blogs hacked into [and] infected machines had been used both to spy on their owners as well as to attack blogs containing messages of political dissent".

There is no word that the company intends to withdraw from Vietnam, despite "[a]nalysts, rights groups and diplomats say[ing that] the human rights situation in Vietnam has been worsening."

An organisation called Boycott Sri Lanka has produced a couple of videos under the provocative title of No Blood For Panties. Both videos, from one of which the screenshot left is captured, are available here. The highly implausible premise of the second video (entitled "Therapy") is that a guy - upon removing his girlfriend's panties before sex - sees the "Made in Sri Lanka" tag and can't perform due to picturing human rights abuses in that country. As the guy states during the ensuing relationship counselling session (resulting from his girlfriend's inability to understand why boycotting Sri Lanka is important to him): "I took her panties off. And I checked the label. And it said made in Sri Lanka [...] Okay, when you think about panties you think about someone sexy, right? When you think about Sri Lanka, you think about killing and murders..." No Blood For Panties is part of a campaign to encourage Americans to boycott products made in Sri Lanka. You can see more on the campaign here.

The solution is to buy panties made elsewhere, I guess. Too bad the people who made the video don't give us any hints on where that might be...