Human Rights

When Alma Aranda tried to exercise her legal right to take unpaid time off to care for her dying mother, Verizon harassed her with so much paperwork that her hair fell out. In a new CorpWatch investigation into federal contractors who violate workers rights, Chris Thompson tells her story. Read More

Calvin Bryant was crippled in a Imperial Sugar plant explosion in Savannah, Georgia, that also killed 14 of his co-workers. In a new CorpWatch investigation into federal contractors who win millions in government business despite violating workers rights, Chris Thompson tells his story. Read More

Rodney Bridgett was killed when a piece of Tyson Foods' heavy equipment crushed him at the company's beef processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa. In a new CorpWatch investigation into federal contractors who win millions in government business despite violating workers rights, Chris Thompson tells his story. Read More

Saudi Star Agricultural Development plans to pump $100 million into a rice export project in Gambella region of Ethiopia despite allegations of human rights violations surrounding the "villagization" program under which the land has been taken from indigenous Anuak pastoralists to lease to foreign investors. 
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A U.S. court has refused to allow family members of three murdered Colombian union leaders the opportunity to sue Occidental Petroleum. The families claimed that the Los Angeles based company should be held responsible since it allegedly provided financial support for the military unit that killed the men. Read More

Firestone, a U.S. tire company, paid out millions of dollars to Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord in the 1990s, despite knowing about his brutal human rights record, according to documents uncovered by ProPublica, an investigative journalism website. Taylor is now serving a 50 year prison sentence for war crimes. Read More

Tomato pickers in Morocco - who supply fresh produce during the winter to big European supermarket chains like Albert Heijn in the Netherlands and Sainsbury's and Tesco in the UK - are paid poverty wages, according to a new report from Fairfood International. Read More

A federal jury has found three former Blackwater contractors guilty of manslaughter and a fourth guilty of murder for killing 17 Iraqis in Baghdad's Nissour Square on September 16, 2007. The men were private security guards hired to provide security to U.S. government employees at the time. Read More

Indigenous activists burned down a bridge in British Columbia, Canada, to prevent Imperial Metals from starting a lead and zinc mine on the lands of the Secwepemc peoples. Local tribes say that the mine may severely impact the one of the largest remaining sockeye salmon populations in the world. Read More

Whisper - a new social network that claims to provide anonymity - has been accused of secretly tracking users. The allegations were made by the Guardian newspaper, provoking renewed scrutiny of a multitude of data privacy claims made by software companies. Read More