Amnesty International Launches "Share Power" to Leverage Shareholder Advocacy Efforts (A)

This month, Amnesty International launched a new initiative dubbed “Share Power” to coordinate and broaden grassroots and institutional support for shareholder resolutions addressing key human rights and environmental issues. In its first year, the Share Power initiative will highlight two resolutions that Amnesty is co-filing with socially responsible investors asking companies to report on their liabilities from past environmental disasters. One of these is a resolution that Trillium Asset Management has taken the lead in filing at ChevronTexaco the past two years, asking the company to report how it is addressing human and environmental risks posted by contamination from Texaco’s past drilling in Ecuador. The second resolution asks Dow company to report on how it is addressing the legacy of the tragic 1984 gas leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant. (Union Carbide is now a Dow subsidiary.)
The Share Power campaign aims to boost support for these resolutions by involving Amnesty International’s 350,000 individual members in efforts to convince mutual funds, pension funds, universities, and other institutional investors to support these resolutions, and to bring other pressure to bear against targeted companies. For more information, read Amnesty International’s Share Power press release.