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The beginnings of Global Witness: Simon, Charmian and I met
while working for an environmental organization.
We were interested, individually and coincidentally, in Cambodia
and the Khmer Rouge rebel group, notorious for their genocidal policies.
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Khmer Rouge, at that stage, were in the forrest [UNCLEAR].
Basically, they were cutting logs
and exporting thme to Thai-based companies.
And we asked ourselves the question:
is this an environmental problem, is this a human rights problem?
The three of us, just instinctively, I think, saw where the two overlapped,
so where environmental destruction was often funding abuse of human rights.
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No organization, at that time, was looking at that nexus.
And what we did was to, basically, pose as log buyers.
We travelled around the border and we asked questions as buyers.
Where did you get the logs from? How much?
Who did you pay, et cetera, et cetera, and they told us everything,
which we filmed.
It went on the front page the next day, so they shut the border.
We, basically, took their money away.
So that was the beginning of us.
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With the collapse of the Khmer Rouge,
Global Witness zeroed in on the intersection of natural resource exploitation,
corruption and conflict.
Global Witness's investigations always follow the money.
We look at the roots of conflict, corruption,
where is the money coming from, where is it going.
This focus led them to look at the drivers of conflict and environmental destruction
and how to combat corruption in the extractive sector and the international financial system,
including anonymous companies.
These companies set up all over the Planet and nobody really knows who owns them,
and it's a charter for companies ripping off and looting resources from empoverished countries.
It's missused because of the anonymity.
Global Witness has pioneered global campaings for corporate transparency
and the organization created the Publish What You Pay campaign,
which is now a global movement,
advocating for financial transparency in the extractives industry.
We follow the evidence and the evidence tells us its own story.
When I look around me,
surrounded by abundant resource of diamond, iron ore, timber,
it baffles me that
people live in the type of poverty that I see in my communities.
We've got no place to go.
This is our home.
This is our land.
Our great-grandfathers were born here,
and we grew up here.
Yesterday, we were visiting villages that are
being absolutely squeezed down by [UNCLEAR] concessions.
The palm oil industry is extremely lucrative and, as they exhaust their own forrest,
they're looking to Africa, to expand.
Can you explain what happened?
They have guns.
They harm us and they tie us,
they beat us, and they do it like this - tie me.
They go and actually do paramilitary units,
to engage in deferring violence against those communities.
We will be working with local and national civil society groups,
and with all of you,
to try and protect the right that you have in these lands.
The overall mission, of course,
is to make sure that natural resources benefit the countries that they come from
and the people that should be benefiting from those natural resources.
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