Human Rights : Audio

Dan Viederman is executive director of Verite, a non-profit organization monitoring international labor rights abuses in off-shore production sites

Human rights and trade--the relationship dates back millennia. Despite this long history, however, we still have very little understanding of how to use trade to promote human rights. This according to today's guest, Susan Ariel Aaronson, author of Trade Imbalance: The Struggle to Weigh Human Rights in Trade Policymaking, out from Cambridge University Press in late 2007.

Three days before PetroChina’s annual meeting of shareholders, a broad-based international set of civil society organizations including human rights, corporate accountability, religious and anti-genocide groups from 17 countries have signed an open letter to the United Nations Global Compact.

CWR co-host Bill Baue speaks with Mil Niepold, senior policy advisor at Verité, a supply chain monitoring and auditing nonprofit that serves as secretariat of the International Cocoa Verification Board, and Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum.

CWR co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon speak with Eric Cohen, chairperson for Investors against Genocide and Tim Smith, senior vice president at Walden Asset Management and immediate past chair of the Social Investment Forum, about the campaign promoting targeted divestment by mutual funds from companies supporting the Khartoum regime in the Sudan.

West Africa supplies much of the cocoa used by the major chocolate companies, and the region is also known for using child labor. Gretchen Wilson reports measures the U.S. and chocolate industry are taking to free child cocoa workers.

Corporate Watchdog Radio co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Bill Baue speak with Rachel Louise Snyder, author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade.

February 18, 2007 - University of San Francisco Ethics Professor David Batstone speaks about his research in writing "Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It" and his launching of the Not for Sale campaign to help end human trafficking.