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Dear Supporter,

Decade after decade, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s abundance of natural resources has drawn in foreign governments and multinational corporations looking to make a profit and serve their own interests. However, those interests have often led to brutal outcomes for the Congolese people.

“Turning Off Congo’s Looting Machine,” a new op-ed by The Sentry’s co-founder John Prendergast, details the cycles of looting that the country has experienced over the past century and how, today, policy tools of financial pressure can finally be utilized to disrupt the latest cycle. Throughout the DRC’s natural resource supply chains, profits pass through banks based in the US and Europe, creating “an opportunity to impose accountability on the beneficiaries of the DRC’s looting machine.”

The network sanctions imposed on the Israeli mining tycoon Dan Gertler and the Belgian gold dealer Alain Goetz and their global network of companies have already shown positive outcomes for the DRC.

Other governments have begun to adopt sanctions programs that sanction individuals and entities on the basis of corruption and human rights abuses, patterned after the US Global Magnitsky sanctions program. Japan, however, remains an outlier as “the only G-7 nation that does not have the legal authority to trigger sanctions for egregious violations of human rights.”

In a joint op-ed, The Sentry’s director of illicit finance policy Justyna Gudzowska and Akira Igata, project lecturer at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo, argue that Japan needs to adopt its own version as well. Previous attempts to do so have failed, but a new draft of a sanctions program was submitted to Japan’s parliament in June, offering another opportunity for the country to adopt a human rights-focused sanctions program.

The perpetrators of human rights abuses and corruption, such as those enabling the looting of the DRC, won’t stop until we impose consequences on them. Global Magnitsky-style sanctions work–they just need to be deployed as part of an escalating financial pressure strategy tied to coherent diplomatic objectives.

Thank you for staying tuned in to our work as we seek to create the leverage needed to combat corruption.

Sincerely,

Ian Schwab
Chief of Staff