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Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

A Voice for the Poor

  
     
 

An important voice in shareholders’ meetings for many large corporations is the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.  According to the group’s web site (http://www.iccr.org/), “for over thirty years” they have been “a leader of the corporate social responsibility movement. . . . Each year ICCR-member religious institutional investors sponsor over 100 shareholder resolutions on major social and environmental issues.”

 

The United States Province of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate is a member of ICCR, represented primarily by Fr. Seamus Finn, OMI, director of the province’s Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation Office (JPIC).

 

A recent and ongoing effort of ICCR is to urge some of the top drug makers to assess what they are doing to address the HIV and AIDS epidemic in developing countries, especially vis-à-vis their charity work, and what impact the pandemic has on their businesses.

 

Seamus Finn is the chairman of ICCR's HIV/AIDS Caucus.  The caucus also focuses on what the companies are doing about other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis in poor countries.

 

So far, companies such as Pfizer, Merck and Abbott are not in favor of the kind of study the ICCR is requesting. 

 

By some estimates, some 42 million people in the world are living with HIV/AIDS.  The vast majority of them (95%) live in developing and poor countries.  A mere 4% of those who need HIV/AIDS treatment are able to get it.

 

While the big drug companies have made some effort in charitable aid to those developing countries, ICCR believes that much more can and should be done.  "In our experience over the last three years, while pharmaceuticals companies...have been making some effort...the scale hasn't even made a dent into what that response needs to be," Seamus said in a recent press conference.

 

The concern about HIV/AIDS is part of ICCR’s broader interest in assuring adequate health care for all persons.  According to the ICCR web site, the goals and objectives of their Access to Health Care Working Group are these:

 

We seek to:

  • Ensure fair and equitable domestic pharmaceutical pricing that is good for both consumers and shareholders;

  • Improve the corporate response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, including the provision of anti-retroviral drugs to employees and their families; and

Create sustainable, affordable access to HIV/AIDS medications in the developing world through voluntary non-exclusive licensing and other such methods.