On January 31st, a group of 20 civil society organizations presented a series of observations and recommendations to the draft Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), expressing concerns around the lack of clear commitments to prevent and address reprisals in the context of activities funded by the bank.
Although retaliations are mentioned 14 times throughout the document, there are no provisions intended to clearly regulate the mechanisms through which the bank itself will evaluate the risks of retaliation, take preventive actions, and respond to allegations of retaliation. The only mechanism mentioned is the grievance redress mechanism, clearly inadequate to ensure that the risks of retaliation are analyzed before the approval of projects, in a preventive and comprehensive manner, and in a way that does not put defenders at risk.
Reprisal risks have the potential to seriously undermine ADB’s commitments, in particular in the area of meaningful stakeholder engagement, anticorruption and integrity. They may also hinder access to the ADB’s accountability mechanism.
In the letter below, you can see the series of specific recommendations we presented to the ADB.
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