Campaign archive

The global minerals trade has funded abuses and armed conflict for decades. Minerals that have bankrolled social and environmental harms still end up in our mobile phones, laptops and cars.

Ill-gotten gains don’t disappear by themselves. Dictators, warlords and other criminals need ways to hide their identity and move dirty cash around the world.

Our work with civil society groups in forest-rich countries to engage with policy makers to improve access to information and advocate for capable, responsive and accountable forest sector governance – including through IFM.

We are campaigning for a global legal framework to hold companies and those who finance them to account for their impacts on people and planet.

Following a market boom in the mid-2000s, rubber companies expanded into new land in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar with disastrous consequences. Global Witness has been working with the rubber industry to raise awareness of the risks and encourage sustainable sourcing

Governments of forest-rich countries routinely flout their own rules on forest protection, striking secret deals for access to forested land. Yet these abuses don’t happen in isolation. They depend on international markets that accept illegal timber and other products associated with deforestation

The illicit trade in diamonds has funded wars and human rights abuses for decades. Global Witness was the first organisation to bring this issue to the world’s attention. Despite positive steps, the links between diamonds and abuse will only be fully broken when all companies involved in the trade change their behaviour

Corruption and fraud in the oil, gas and mining industries props up brutal regimes and lines the pockets of kleptocrats. Companies and governments must end the secrecy and bring deals and profits into the open

Commercial pressure to produce agricultural commodities like palm oil and rubber has been cranking up demand for land, and further concentrating resources in the hands of an elite few. Our work has exposed the secret deals struck between governments and investors, robbing communities of land that’s rightfully theirs

Anonymous shell companies are getaway cars for the world’s criminal and corrupt. We have been campaigning to take away the keys, by pushing governments to change laws and bring the people who own and control companies - the so-called ‘beneficial’ owners - out into the open