About CIPA

CIPA seeks to further the study and public understanding of problems and affairs of the peoples of the United States and other nations of the world through conferences, research, seminars and workshops, publications, and other means. The Council itself was founded in l954 as a nonprofit human rights, education, research and publishing group.

CIPA works to protect and strengthen International Human Rights through grass roots organizing and public education. It also seeks remedies for human rights violations, primarily by exposing the roots of corporate power in the U.S. and worldwide. POCLAD (the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy), a project of CIPA founded 16 years ago, is in the forefront of this struggle in the U.S. The ICJB (International Coalition for Justice in Bhopal), another project incubated by CIPA, has waged a tri-continental political and legal struggle for the survivors of the world’s worst industrial disaster, against two multi-national corporations between the U.S., India and the UK, for some 24 years.

CIPA co-produced the 2006 People’s Law Tribunal at the World Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia, the 2004 People’s Law Tribunal at the World Social Forum in Mumbai and the 1999 Seattle/World Trade Organization Global People’s Tribunal on Corporate Crimes Against Humanity, both co-organized by CIPA then executive director, Ward Morehouse. CIPA challenges the international neo-liberal legal anarchy, which allows US-based (and other) multinational corporations to act with impunity and recklessness around the world, through grass roots campaigns and People’s Law Tribunals.

CIPA's work for the last 20+ years includes challenging the corporate crimes against humanity of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, the two US-based multinational corporations, in the 1984 chemical spill in Bhopal, India. [This issue is well developed in the 2004 Amnesty International report “Clouds of Injustice” citing Bhopal, India as a case study.] CIPA's publishing arm, the Apex Press, has published numerous works on the Bhopal case. “The Bhopal Reader," serves as a guide for activists working on harms perpetrated by corporations. CIPA is the publisher of POCLAD books and works collaboratively with POCLAD, the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy.

CIPA holds meetings at the annual National Lawyers Guild conventions of its Corporations Committee, sometimes jointly with the NLG Environmental Committee, to propose People's Law programs to address Ungovernable International Corporation and the Crimes Against Humanity and Environmental Justice that result from that, as established in an Amnesty International Case Study in 2004. *

CIPA helped organize a series of Tribunals around the Charter on Industrial Hazards and Human Rights, a People's law document, that has been endorsed by worker rights organizations as standards for worker and community protections. [The 1976 Algiers Universal Declaration of the Rights of People's, articulates the rights of "peoples" going beyond the United Nation's focus on the individual to recognizing the rights of "communities" and empowering communities to resist corporate colonization. Most People’s Tribunals have adopted this recognition of communities’ collective rights since its formulation.]

CIPA's Publishing Work

Its publishing arm, (see The Apex Press), has published books for 40 years to build democracy with equality and the rule of law and international understanding—without which there can be no real democracy. This perspective has shaped our work as an independent small publishing house. Our publishing program has a special focus on economic and social justice and world cultures.

The Apex Press books provided critical voices and new approaches to significant economic, social and political issues before many of these ideas went mainstream. Its titles address these issues in the United States, other industrialized countries, and the Third World.

Affiliations and Current Projects of the Council:

• National Jobs for All Coalition
  The National Jobs for All Coalition is committed to building a new movement for full employment at livable wages. This goal unites a diverse group of otherwise divided, single-issue constituencies.
• Institute for Energy and Environment Research
  IEER is dedicated to increasing public involvement in and control over environmental problems through the democratization of science.
• Permanent Peoples Tribunal
  The texts of people's law exist in many different forms such as Declarations and Charters, Calls to Action, verdicts by people's tribunals, poetry, vision statements, and solidarity messages. An effort is underway at the People's Law Programme at the Lelio Basso Foundation in Rome (with which CIPA is informally affiliated) to identify and codify these instruments, as well as to link people's law events and actions, especially in the realm of people's tribunals . These tribunals, focused largely in human rights violations but potentially on a wide variety of issues and concerns, cultural and otherwise, have their antecedents in the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal during the Viet Nam War three decades ago. That happening led to the creation of the Permanent People's Tribunal at the Basso Foundation in Rome, which has organized tribunals on many different topics, ranging from the Bhopal disaster in India to the human rights record of the World Bank and the IMF.
• Global Information Network
  Global Information Network (GIN), a not-for-profit news and world media operation, is the largest distributor of Developing World news services, including the award-winning Inter Press Service, in the U.S. For more than 10 years, Global has been supplying wide ranging coverage of the Developing World - news, analysis, features, breaking stories, blanket coverage and in-depth follow-up from Santiago to Shanghai - to print, broadcast and web media in the U.S. Global also supplies coverage of industrial countries and multinational corporations. What do events and trends in Europe or the United States mean for developing countries? How do decisions made in board rooms in New York or Hamburg affect peasants in South Africa or slum dwellers in India? The stories are in Global's newsfiles. Global believes that in-depth contextualized analysis is the best way to inform, and our Developing World news services still scoop the competition.
• TOES/USA
  (The Other Economic Summit) is part of an international non-governmental collaboration whose major activity is a yearly forum/exposition held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the G-8 (the world's leading industrial countries - the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan). TOES/USA also publishes books, occasional newsletters, and maintains contact with TOES-related colleagues in other countries.
• Bhopal Library
  This collection of books chronicles 25 years of ongoing corporate crimes by two major multinational corporations (Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals). It reveals the evolving understanding of the meaning of the Bhopal, India chemical spill for understanding the danger to human rights of globalization. In its major Bhopal case study, "Clouds of Injustice", Amnesty International's main conclusion is the need to make Human Rights a key standard in today's industrial globalization. The failure to clean up the site to this day has created yet new victims of polluted water aquifers of lethal chemicals leaking into the soil. To date no legal authority has compelled the corporation to correct these human rights violations.
• Caging the Corporation
  a series of small symposia sponsored by CIPA to build a movement to examine how to govern "the corporation" and to build links between other campaigns against individual corporations and groups working on these deeply related issues.
• Palestine-Israel Journal
  Friends of Palestine-Israel Journal, USA, is an affiliated project of CIPA. The Friends group raises support for the only joint Palestinian-Israeli produced journal in the region, seeking to build a peaceful solution to the conflict.
• ACWR, A Center for the World's Religions
  This group, an affiliated project of CIPA, serves to promote dialogue and collaboration between members of the world's faith traditions in equal partnership. It proposes an agenda to foster peace and to eradicate poverty through worldwide disarmament and a truly empowered United Nations.

Some of CIPA's Past Achievements:

• Policy Studies Associates (PSA), which published materials for college and pre-college students that develop policy studies and citizenship skills. These learning packages combined with other works can still be obtained from Apex Press under Guide to Democratic Citizenship.
• Conference on Music, The Public Domain and the Cultural Commons, chaired by Pete Seeger and incubated by CIPA, was held at the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action at Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY, in Nov. 2004. An invitation-only gathering attended by many musicians of public note, took part in discussions to challenge corporate dominance of encroaching on the "cultural commons" where the "folk process" thrives and nurtures the development of music that celebrates cultures and social struggle. The project sought to publicize the collaborative nature of folk music and the right to historical knowledge carried by music of the people as intrinsic to democracy.
• Center for International Training and Education (CITE), was a project of CIPA headed by director Ward Morehouse and the late Leon Clark, a prominent international educator, who died unexpectedly in 2003. CITE spawned the "Eyes Books" now still available from the Apex Press but with the loss of Dr. Leon Clark, the Center was disbanded and the books have been updated by new editors with Publisher Ward Morehouse filling in for Leon Clark. The "Eyes books" seek to further the understanding of other societies and cultures through the eyes of its own peoples.
• TOES Books were an initiative of TOES/USA to further dialogue on and increase understanding of those issues on the TOES agenda: economic ideas and practices on which a more just and sustainable society can be built — "an economics as if people mattered." These books can be found in two sections of the Apex Press: Alternative Economics and Sustainability Without Corporations.
• Too Much Newsletter was incubated by CIPA with labor writer Sam Pizzigati, author of the Apex Press book "Greed and Good."
• Bhopal Action Resource Center, was active for many years supporting the struggle of the victims of the world's worst industrial disaster for justice. CIPA became a center for document collection for researchers from all over the world. The Center grew out of the U.S. Citizens Commission for Bhopal. During the buildup to the 20th anniversary, CIPA developed and maintained a website to provide information for U.S. media and citizens about the work of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.
• Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, was a project incubated buy CIPA, with CIPA director Ward Morehouse as co-founder of POCLAD with prominent anti-corporate activist Richard Grossman in 1994. POCLAD strives to strengthen democratic control over corporations. CIPA published books with and for POCLAD until 2008 and still continues to distribute them along with other books on Corporate Personhood and Human Rights.

The People Who Do CIPA's Work

Officers and Trustees of the Council:
Chair: Richard Bernstein, (Attorney, New York, NY)
Vice-Chair: Sheila Collins, (Professor of Political Science, William Patterson University, Wayne, NY)
Secretary-Treasurer: Ward Morehouse, (co-founder, President Emeritus, and former Director of CIPA for 58 years)
Leah Margulies, (Project Director, City Bar Association, New York, NY)
Lisa Vives, (Executive Director, Global Information Network, New York, NY)
Mary Uva, (Attorney and Corporate Activist, Stamford, CT)

Staff
Carolyn Toll Oppenheim, Interim Executive Director (consultant), Northampton, MA
Marco Conner, Programs & Office Manager, Brooklyn, NY

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