Flores on New Reporting Rules for US Investors in Myanmar: "a step in the wrong direction"
US hikes investment ceiling for Myanmar reporting
Senior US administration officials said on May 17 that as part of actions to help trade, investment and the new government, the US would raise the reporting threshold for “aggregate new investment” from US$500,000 to $5 million.
The announcement came as part of a series of amendments to the US sanctions regime against Myanmar following the country’s transition to a democratically elected government.
[...]
Claudia Flores, director of the University of Chicago Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), said the change in threshold was a “step in the wrong direction”.
She and a team from the IHRC visited Myanmar earlier this year, and heard repeatedly that workers face barriers to securing basic workplace rights, Ms Flores said.
Given Myanmar’s history of human rights abuse, ensuring investment is done responsibility and meets human rights standards is critical, the IHRC has said.
For US firms “a duty to report is, at best, tenuously connected to any financial burden”, said Ms Flores. “A $5 million threshold would only encompass rather large investments leaving all other investments unaccountable in their adverse impact on human rights.”
The IHRC in January submitted comments to the US State Department, noting that some firms, particularly international garment and footwear brands, operating in Myanmar maintain they are not required to report.
Reports from other companies provide little in the way of useful information that would allow civil society groups to monitor whether human rights are being protected, the IHRC said.
The IHRC wants better-defined reporting requirements, which include details of what kind of policies and procedures firms must design to address how their operations
affect things like human rights, that require US firms to disclose the identify of their local partners and that are available in Myanmar language.
“If the threshold is increased, it should follow that the requirements are more rigorous than those currently drafted,” Ms Flores said.
Read more at Myanmar Times