Update from Southern Africa Resource Watch

The new government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has produced its plan of action for 2007-2011. It has also put out a short plan of action for this year which will run from March 2007 to December 2007. In this short plan of action which is called “Government Contract” the actions of government in the extractive Industries will focus on:

• the implementation of the EITI (this has certainly reduced the doubt we had about the commitment of the new government to implement the initiative);

• the publication of important documents and analysis of all contracts in the extractive industry;

• the renegotiation of dubious contracts;

• reform of all national extractive companies;

• the elaboration and adoption of adequate and transparent procedures in dealing with new mining contracts (exploration or exploitation);

• conclusion and publication of the judicial evaluation currently taking place on logging concessions with the view to cancelling the dubious ones.

• building the capacity of the Congolese office in charge of the environment to be able to apply concrete actions to protect the environment.

This is certainly good news for the DRC. We need to monitor that government does respect its commitment.