NGOs walk out of OECD meeting

(Ethical Corporation, London, December 2007) In November, a group of NGOs including UK’s Corner House, Friends of the Earth France and America’s Environmental Defense walked out of a meeting with the OECD Export Credit Group. The meeting had been called to seek ways of incorporating “sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, corruption, and sustainable debt relief” into export credit agreements backed by the OECD and its member states. In a letter to the OECD written after their walkout, the NGOs said discussion was futile in light of what they called the OECD’s “flagrant disregard for basic environmental and social standards”, citing examples including the granting earlier this year of German, Austrian and Swiss export credits for the Ilisu dam in Turkey, which violates World Bank/IFC environmental and social policies.