Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

180 winer and rouleAccordingly, the convention necessarily covers laundering of the proceedsof crimes involving certification abuses. However, there is nointernational mechanism to coordinate activity between those regulatingand enforcing the laws governing money laundering or financialtransparency and those seeking to enforce certification regimes.Disclosure and Monitoring InitiativesThe United Nations, international financial institutions, and variousnongovernmental organizations have undertaken a wide range of privatesector disclosure and public sector monitoring initiatives in connectionwith the illicit exploitation of commodities. 21 These include allof the sectoral certification processes discussed above as well as variouslocal mechanisms in other sectors, including timber and oil.The Forest Crimes Monitoring Unit, established in Cambodia bythe World Bank and the government and supported by the UnitedNations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Foodand Agriculture Organization (FAO), Australia, Denmark, and theUnited Kingdom. The unit is designed to assist the Cambodian governmentto combat forest crime. This unit includes a Forest Crime MonitoringOffice in the Department of Forestry and Wildlife, a Departmentof Inspection in the Ministry of the Environment, and independentmonitoring by Global Witness, whose efforts led to the initiative. A keycomponent is the development of systems for tracking logs and casesof forest crime, which have improved accountability and transparencyand led to a significant increase in enforcement actions. In an attemptto curtail illegal logging, bilateral agreements have been drawn upbetween Indonesia and its largest trading partners. The Indonesiangovernment has signed an agreement with the British governmentunder which the United Kingdom will move to ban the import of illegalIndonesian logs into Europe. This was driven by the large “greenmovement” in the United Kingdom, which also assisted in the “lighttouchmechanisms” placed in the U.K. Pension Act. Extensive use ofsuch agreements with other countries may result in a significant decreasein the export of illicit timber from Indonesia. International pressurehas convinced Malaysia to join the International Tropical TimberOrganization, which issues guidelines for the sustainable managementof natural tropical forests. To date, none of these timber-related initiativescontains a financial monitoring element relating to formal orinformal financial sectors.Although other initiatives have been undertaken in the oil sectorwhereby private sector entities make various commitments to sociallyresponsible extraction, the Publish What You Pay campaign, launched