Clean Trade
Trustees Report and Financial Statements
Financial period: 1[st] September 2021 – 31[st] August 2022
Charitable Incorporated Organisation Registration number 1177571
Reference & Administrative Details:
Board of Trustees:
Prof. Leif Wenar (Chairperson) (indefinite appointment) Mr. Paul Jourdan (appointed on 14[th] March 2018 for a five-year term, to be proposed for re-appointment)
Mr. Richard Meeran (re-appointed on 17th June 2022 for a four-year term)
Dr. Octavio Ferraz (re-appointed on 18[th] June 2021 for a three-year term)
Chief Executive: Mr. Andrew Togher
Registered Office: 78 Offord Road London N1 1EB
Principal Bankers: Virgin Money 154 – 158 Kensington High Street London W8 7RL
Type of Governing Document: Constitution of a Charitable Incorporated Organisation whose only voting members are its charity trustees
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INTRODUCTION
The Trustees of Clean Trade present their report and accounts for the financial period 1[st] September 2021 - 31[st] August 2022.
Clean Trade was incorporated as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation on the 14[th] March 2018. The trustees would like to offer sincere thanks to all those involved in supporting Clean Trade for their hard work since then, seeking to establish the right of peoples to benefit from their countries’ natural wealth and resources.
Objectives for the financial period ending 31[st] August 2022 were to continue research and outreach to put into action the strategy agreed by the Trustees in September 2019. Funding was in place to allow operations to continue in the financial year 2021-22.
The core strategy of engagement with the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies was derailed by the global pandemic, but by the beginning of 2022 the core team reached the conclusion that conditions would be improved by the summer, and that events to showcase Clean Trade’s message would be likely to succeed. For the remainder of 2021 the team developed collateral that would form the background to approaches to key stakeholder groups: the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies, investors and the legal profession.
Governance
Clean Trade was formed using the standard Foundation constitution for Charitable Incorporated Organisations provided by the Charity Commission of England & Wales. The charity was formed with four trustees who will each serve terms as listed above, as founding trustees. The charity has been formed as a CIO whose only voting membership is its charity trustees. The founding trustees were selected by the Chair based on their respective sets of expertise; future trustees will be selected based on their relevant expertise and will be appointed by the existing Board of Trustees.
Policies & Procedures
Clean Trade has put in place policies and procedures on the following subjects, which are available upon request:
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General Data Protection Regulations
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Fundraising
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Health & Safety
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Whistleblowing, Complaints & Safeguarding
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Risk Management
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Anti-Money Laundering
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Conflicts of Interests
As the charity currently has no direct employees, with staff working on a consultancy and/or voluntary basis, human resources policies are not yet required.
Objectives
The trustees confirm that they have complied with the duty in Section 17(5) of the Charities Act 2011 and the Charities (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2008 to have due regard to the Charity Commission’s general guidance on public benefit.
The charitable objects set out in Clean Trade’s incorporation documents are:
To promote human rights (as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and subsequent United Nations conventions and declarations), and in particular the right of all peoples to enjoy and utilise fully and freely their natural wealth and resources, so that they may for their own ends freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.
Background and mission
By 2012, the world’s leading resource-rich states outside the West were on average no richer, no freer and no more peaceful than they were even in 1980. What drives these failures is who controls resource revenues in these states. In most major resource-exporting states, the revenues are controlled by authoritarian regimes and armed groups that are entirely unaccountable to the people of the country; this empowers them to be more oppressive or violent or corrupt. Authoritarians and armed groups in countries that export high-value extractives - oil, metals and gems - can ignore their citizen’s rights while seeding wars and terrorism that impact the security and prosperity of people around the world.
Most civil wars, most authoritarian regimes, most hunger crises, and most highly corrupt governments are in countries rich with oil,
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metals or gems. These countries are also the source of most of the world’s refugees and will soon be home to most of the world’s extreme poverty.
Western consumers sponsor misrule when they buy products - from oil to mobile phones - without knowing where their raw materials come from, or that they are sending trillions of dollars a year through supply chains to fund authoritarian regimes. Stolen resources make their way into every facet of daily lives across the world.
Since the 17[th] century, national trade laws made it legal to buy natural resources from anyone who has control over them, even if the control is by force. This rule of ‘might makes right’ is what gives legitimacy to the purchase of resources from oppressive regimes and armed groups. Other forms of ‘might makes right,’ such as the slave trade and colonial rule, have long been abolished in international law—yet coercion-based trade in resources remains the international norm today.
Fortunately, the language of international Human Rights law is clear: it insists that it is the people, and not the powerful, who have the ultimate right to control the resources of their country. Clean Trade works to bring resource trade into the modern era by increasing recognition of the human right of all peoples to the natural resources of their country. Countries where the people can hold their government accountable for resource exports are much less likely to suffer authoritarian rule, grand corruption, civil war, and their resulting tragedies.
Clean Trade’s vision is for a world in which all peoples can hold accountable those who sell off their natural resources. Our mission is to see citizens’ rights to their natural resources respected worldwide, as a matter of national and international law.
Activities and outcomes
The activities Clean Trade has pursued for the public benefit during the financial period of 1[st] September 2021 – 31[st] August 2022, were in pursuance of the charitable objects, namely to promote human rights and in particular the right of all peoples to enjoy and utilise fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.
Strategy
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Clean Trade has undertaken research and built contacts in the areas that have a bearing on international trade in natural resources. Funding from the Joffe Foundation in 2019 allowed the team to develop a three-year strategy. This involved global stakeholder outreach and analysis, and a legal and economic analysis of Clean Trade’s evidence base. This work was completed in September 2019, and formed the core of Clean Trade’s subsequent strategic plan. This three-year plan was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a key goal, dialogue with key stakeholder groups, was realised in 2022.
Clean Trade’s strategy seeks to promote peoples’ rights to their natural resource wealth. These rights in international law are based on the human rights treaties that form the International Bill of Human Rights: the International Convention on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
The strategic aim for Clean Trade is to seek clarification of the natural resource rights aspects of these major Human Rights treaties. We focused on the articles affirming the resource rights of peoples, common to both treaties. Article 1.2 of both treaties states:
All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources… In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.
Such clarification would underpin and bring credibility to our quest for legal remedies, for government legislation, and help bring about the adoption of natural resource rights in business and investor standards. The route to achieve this is to prepare the case for a General Comment or other clarification on the interpretation of the articles affirming the resource rights of peoples, to be made by one or both of the two relevant UN Treaty Body Committees (CESCR and HRC). We were fortunate to be joined by Prof. Jérémie Gilbert who is based at Roehampton University London, and has extensive experience in this area.
Activities and achievements
In order to construct a case for the United Nations, the team gathered evidence from CESCR and HRC documents. Past documentation from the treaty bodies such as General Comments, State Party Reports, and Lists of Issues was analysed for references relevant to Clean Trade’s mission, across all states covered by the two treaties, going back ten years.
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The Clean Trade Governance Index is updated annually and forms the core evidence base for the legal, investment and government workstreams. It allows organisations to measure their exposure to states that do not respect their citizens’ natural resource rights. The Index is an amalgamation of external indices which measure how each country respects its peoples’ rights to have a voice in and benefit from their natural resource wealth, and provides a ranking of countries based on these rights.
The Index was updated in 2021 using the latest figures from the World Bank, the Economist and Freedom House, reviewed for accuracy and suitability, and checked for institutional bias. The Index was further tailored following investment sector feedback.
Clean Trade continued to participate in and offer strategic input to the Publish What You Pay alliance, which makes collective representations to governments and gatherings such as the G7 meetings.
At the beginning of 2022 there were signs that the UN was experiencing less disruption, and Environmental Social and Governance based investing was going from strength to strength. Encouraged by this we decided to hold a series of summer events leveraging the expertise of our Trustees in international law, investment, and litigation.
Unforeseen at that time, the tragic events in Ukraine gave even more urgency to our mission. Clean Trade's assertion is that when authoritarians control resource revenues without being accountable to citizens, there are strong links to corruption and violence, which frequently takes place outside the borders of the source country. We see this in the use of Russian oil revenues to support military action.
Clean Trade and the Transnational Law Institute at King’s College London co-sponsored the event The Rights of Peoples over Natural Resources on June 21st 2022 at Kings College. UN Human Rights Treaty body members, a UN Special Rapporteur and leading academics explored the possibility of a General Comment on the articles affirming the resource rights of peoples, from the two UN Committees that monitor the Human Rights Covenants.
Clean Trade, Amati Global Investors and the Transnational Law Institute co-sponsored the event Breaking the Link between Oil & Gas and War: Putting Human Rights into ESG on 27th June at King’s College. This saw journalists, industry practitioners, investors and analysts examine the absence of critical human rights
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considerations in ESG investment, and the difficulties in finding practical solutions. ESG investing, having seen explosive growth is under scrutiny for making claims that are not necessarily followed through in practice. The goal of the meeting was to underline the gap between, for example, the high ESG scores given to Russian oil companies and the violence that is funded by their oil and gas revenues.
Clean Trade, Leigh Day and the Transnational Law Institute cosponsored a full-day event on 29th June at Leigh Day: Human Rights and Natural Resources. Panels of legal experts used four case studies to examine the human rights impacts of natural resource extraction and exploitation. Leigh Day have successfully litigated against Shell and other multinationals, and this event explored existing and fresh opportunities to hold corporates to account; for Clean Trade this holds the expectation of new avenues to disincentivise trade with authoritarian resource rich states.
Each of these avenues reinforces the others. The UN takes into account evidence that the legal and investment sectors see resource rights as a critical issue. The prospect of litigation, and advances in international law leading to revised corporate standards motivates investors. In addition the legal sector can develop new tactics when international law is clarified by the UN, as well as seeking opportunities in ESG 'greenwashing' litigation.
Funds and Fundraising
Funds at the beginning of the financial year were £19,462. Contact was maintained with funders, seeing updates and input to the Joffe Trust and Polden Puckham. Expenses were kept as low as possible and considerable pro-bono work has been volunteered by the team. The only spend was £10, a payment to Andy Togher in June 2022 necessary to keep the bank account open, as no other payments had been made since March 2021. This left Clean Trade in a strong position with £19,451.90 in the bank.
People
Leif Wenar and Jérémie Gilbert continued in their roles at Stanford and Roehampton Universities respectively, while working with Clean Trade on a pro-bono basis. Andy Togher works on a consultancy/pro bono basis according to budget available.
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We are extremely fortunate to have active and committed Trustees in the investment, legal and academic worlds, and we extend grateful thanks for their advice and participation to Paul Jourdan, Richard Meeran and Octavio Ferraz.
Risk
Risks are monitored closely by both trustees and colleagues. The following risks were identified as requiring monitoring and mitigation strategies:
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Risk: Mitigation Strategy:
Changing composition of UN Treaty Seek clarification of Articles 1.2 via
Bodies lessens possibility of shadow reports; encourage supporters
agreement on a General Comment on treaty bodies to incorporate
supportive language into current draft
General Comments.
Insufficient funds to continue at The team controls expenditure and
current level with paid contractors and dedicates significant resource to
to pursue planned workstreams. fundraising outreach.
Loss of core team member Other members have agreed to take
on increased responsibility if
necessary, and arrangements would
be made where possible to move the
colleague into a trustee or advisory
role to retain knowledge, skills and
relationships.
Operational failure, including IT failure A process has been put in place to
and errors as a result of members of review and confirm key decisions.
the team being located internationally.
Negative press coverage and/or The team will ensure that
erroneous/ potentially libellous communications and, where
information given out by Clean Trade necessary, legal advice is sought as
via research, analysis or part of the internal review process for
communications. communications.
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Financial review
Clean Trade ended its fourth financial year with cash available at £19,452.
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Clean Trade
Receipts and payments accounts
For the period Period start date
To
from Sep 1, 21
Section A Receipts and payments
Unrestricted Endowment
Restricted funds
funds funds
to the nearest
to the nearest £ to the nearest £
£
A1 Receipts
- - -
- -
- - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
Sub total (Gross income for AR) - - -
A2 Asset and investment sales,
(see table).
n/a - - -
- - -
Sub total - - -
Total receipts - -
A3 Payments
Payment to A Togher 10 -
- -
- -
- -
- - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
Sub total 10 - -
A4 Asset and investment
purchases, (see table)
n/a - - -
- - -
Sub total - - -
Total payments 10 - -
Net of receipts/(payments) - 10 - -
A5 Transfers between funds - - -
A6 Cash funds last year end 19,462 - -
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Cash funds this year end 19,452 - -
Section B Statement of assets and liabilities at the end of the period
Unrestricted
Categories Details funds
to nearest £
B1 Cash funds Cash in bank (at 31 Aug 2021) 19,462
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Total cash funds 19,462
(agree balances with receipts and
payments account(s)) ok
Unrestricted
funds
Details to nearest £
B2 Other monetary assets No other monetary assets -
-
-
-
-
-
Fund to which
Details asset belongs
B3 Investment assets No investment assets
Fund to which
Details asset belongs
B4 Assets retained for the No retained assets
charity’s own use
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Fund to which Details liability relates B5 Liabilities No liabilities Signed by one or two trustees on Signature Print N behalf of all the trustees Leif We
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o (if any)
CC16a
Aug 31, 22
Total funds Last year
to the nearest £ to the nearest £
- 20,000
-
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- 20,000
-
- -
- -
- 20,000
10 2,000
- 8,000
- -
- -
-
- -
- -
- -
- -
10 10,000
-
-
- -
10 10,000
- 10 10,000
- -
19,462 9,462
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19,452 19,462
Restricted funds Endowment
funds
to nearest £ to nearest £
- -
- -
- -
- -
OK OK
Restricted funds Endowment
funds
to nearest £ to nearest £
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
Current value
Cost (optional)
(optional)
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
Current value
Cost (optional)
(optional)
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
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Amount due When due (optional) (optional) - - - - - Date of approval #
Name enar
Jun 23, 23