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For exposing how corruption and environmental betrayal go hand-in-hand,

Wins the 2007 Commitment to Development Award

Presented by Foreign Policy and the Center for Global Development

Global Witness, a small Britain-based nongovernmental organization that has crusaded to stop the plunder of rain forests in Cambodia and Burma and helped to bring the problem of conflict diamonds in Africa to the worlds attention, is the winner of the 2007 Commitment to Development Ideas in Action Award, sponsored jointly by the Center for Global Development (CGD) and Foreign Policy magazine.

Nancy Birdsall, president of CGD and Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Moiss Nam co-chaired the selection committee.

The award, bestowed annually since 2003, honors individuals or organizations for raising public awareness and changing the attitudes and policies of the rich world toward developing countries.

Its first investigation of illegal timber sales by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia shut down that trade in 1995. A headline-making Global Witness report in 1998 showed how rebels in Angola were financing a deadly civil war by selling diamonds. That work, along with a January 2000 report by Partnership Africa Canada, another crusading NGO, on the role of diamonds in the civil war in Sierra Leone, figured prominently in the establishment of the Kimberley Process to certify diamonds that are not mined from conflict zones.

Global Witness, which now has a staff of 35 and a $6 million budget, produces reports and videos exposing corruption and environmental wrongdoing, especially in countries awash in oil revenues, from Turkmenistan to Equatorial Guinea. It was a founder of the Publish What You Pay campaign, which seeks transparency about how resource-rich governments spend their share of mineral revenues. Funders include a dozen foundations as well as the development agencies of Britain, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. It recently helped put a timber and arms trafficker in jail in Holland.

Previous Commitment to Development Award Winners Have Included:

U.S. Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) (2006) Former Chancellor of the Exchequer and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown (2005) Oxfams Make Trade Fair Campaign (2004) The European ministers of international development who constitute the Utstein Group (2003)

Excerpts from an interview with Global Witness founder Patrick Alley

Q: What was the genesis of Global Witness?

Charmian Gooch, Simon Taylor and I worked for the Environmental Investigation Agency, which pioneered investigative conservation on subjects like the ivory trade. We identified something missing in the NGO world, which was any focus on the links between the exploitation of natural resources and conflict and corruption. To raise funds we shook cans outside tube stations at 5 a.m. to raise money for international phone calls and research, before gratefully abandoning this when we received our first serious funding, from Novib, in late 1994.

Q: Your first investigation actually shut down the Khmer Rouges illegal timber trade.

Thats right. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed in 1991 and the UN was brokering elections in Cambodia. Wed read that timber was being traded from areas controlled by the Khmer Rouge and thought, Why doesnt somebody stop that? And we said, Hell, why dont we?

Q: It sounds preposterous.

We were alarmingly nave then, but that helped! We flew to Thailand in January 1995 and over five weeks drove 3,500 kilometers, following virtually every road that went towards the border, bearing in mind the Khmer Rouge were on the other side. We pretended to be buyers of timber and got documentation showing that between $10 million and $20 million a month was being generated by the Khmer Rouge sale of timber to Thailand. We carried out advocacy in the US and throughout Europe, building diplomatic pressure on Thailand. The final straw for the Thais was when we highlighted the trade at press conferences in Phnom Penh and Bangkok on May 24 and 25, 1995. They closed the border on May 26, 1995.

Q: You helped to bring the issue of blood diamonds to the world in 1998.

We couldnt approach diamonds in the same way we approached the forest in Cambodia. Any old fool can pretend to be a timber buyer, but the diamond industry is very closed. We talked to many in the industry, and also used publicly available information. For example, DeBeers, one of the worlds largest diamond buyer, said in its annual reports that it was buying rough diamonds from Angola. We thought, Hold on. Most of the diamond fields are under the control of the UNITA rebels waging a civil war that has claimed a half-million lives. We put a few of these figures together in a report that, by coincidence, came out at the same time as war started again in Angola. That catapulted Global Witness into the mainstream and led to the creation of the Kimberley Process Certification Schemea process that De Beers itself has come to champion.

Q: What do you tell a college student who wants to expose corruption in the world?

There was a great quote on the back of the pamphlet for the memorial service for Anita Roddick, the Body Shop founder and one of our first backers. It said, If you think youre too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.

Read the complete interview here.