Charmian Gooch

Charmian Penelope Gooch (born 1965) is a British anti-corruption campaigner and activist.

She is a co-founder and board member of the NGO Global Witness, where she works to uncover and fight corruption in the developing world.

Gooch's career spans over 23 years and has focused on a variety of global issues such as revealing suspect oil and mineral deals and investigating business in various corrupt regimes.

Together with Global Witness, she takes charge of campaigns and investigations that lead to the prevention of "conflict and corruption over natural resources and associated environmental and human rights abuses."

These have included the war on blood diamonds, the depletion of natural resources, illegal and industrial-scale logging, and revenue transparency.

Gooch's involvement with Global Witness has earned her and the organisation a variety of awards and nominations.

Born in 1965, Gooch is a self-confessed "lifelong troublemaker."

She grew up in London and was taught by her parents to question authority.

She has had an interest in environmental issues ever since she was a child, which carried on into her later years as a university graduate.

In 1987, Gooch graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where she studied history and immediately pursued to look for a job after graduation.

Gooch's first professional position was as a researcher at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a non-governmental organisation that was based out of London and focused on exposing polluters and poachers.

It was a branch of Greenpeace that "conducted undercover investigations into environmental crime."

At 22 years of age, Gooch participated in the investigation of the illegal trade in African ivory.

This first foray into the field of uncovering and fighting global atrocities introduced Gooch to various undercover investigation techniques used to address concerning international wildlife trades (for example, whaling and ivory) and other environmental issues.

These early experiences also helped her discover a passion for addressing the plundering of natural resources, and a corrupt system of "loopholes and money laundering" that makes these efforts difficult to effectively police.

Investigations regarding black markets dealing with ivory in the Middle East and Hong Kong also helped her learn about corporate structures and how money moves around.

Gooch's experience with the EIA introduced her to the general world of corruption and thus, the creation of Global Witness.

Global Witness is a British non-governmental organisation based out of London, England.

With the financial backing of hedge-fund billionaire George Soros, the organisation fulfills a watchdog function, and has led a variety of campaigns and investigations aimed at uncovering a global architecture of conflict and corruption, that some have suggested is "woven into" the business of extracting and exploiting natural resources.

Deploying various tactics, including undercover investigations and aggressive forms of lobbying, Gooch and Global Witness fight numerous instances of corruption.

More specifically, they fight instances of corruption in which "money earned from a country's natural resources are diverted away from its rightful owners, the country's citizens."

Global Witness's research and campaigning has made the organisation a "leading global voice on what can be done to stamp out the abuse of anonymous companies."

Using extensive knowledge on how shady businesses and governments inter-operate with each other, Gooch and Global Witness have unveiled various sources of corruption and exploitation and continue to do so.

Gooch met her colleagues and future Global Witness co-founders Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley while they were working together at the Environmental Investigation Agency.

Concerns over the funding of covert warfare through illegal trade had increased at the time.

After discussing the need for a campaign group that could address these and related environmental and human rights issues, the trio decided to take action.

Gooch co-founded Global Witness in 1993 with Taylor and Alley to expose the "nexus of corruption, natural resources, and conflict".

They created Global Witness due to the "looting of entire countries," which they saw as a human rights issue.

At its inception, Gooch and her co-founders solicited donations at London Underground station entrances due to a lack of funding sources.

Eventually, a Dutch charity known as Oxfam Novib provided the trio with enough money to start their first major campaign on the Cambodia-Thailand frontier.

This also became a starting point for them to "build their activism on facts they collected themselves in the field."

In January and February 1995, Gooch and Global Witness undertook an investigation regarding the illegal trade of timber in both Thailand and Cambodia, which was largely responsible for funding the civil war in Cambodia.

Posing as timber buyers, Gooch and her team visited logging camps to study how a Cambodian communist insurgency known as the Khmer Rouge was "collaborating with Thai interests to cut down hardwood forests in violation of a United Nations ban."

One night, while undercover at a Khmer Rouge checkpoint with her colleague Patrick Alley, a local guard stopped Gooch and her co-worker while they were travelling in a car.

The guard was intoxicated and proceeded to lean into the car with an AK-47 before the pair decided to tell the driver to "Go! Go!"

The evidence Gooch and Global Witness managed to obtain was compiled into a report called Forest, Famine, and War – The Key to Cambodia's Future, which was published in March 1995.

Subsequently, the report received widespread press coverage around the world and was widely distributed among delegates of donor countries to Cambodia, as well as various non-governmental organisations and multi-lateral donor agencies.

The international pressure that followed as a result of the report forced Cambodia to introduce a timber export ban in May 1995 that significantly reduced Thai trading with the Khmer Rouge and effectively closed the Cambodian border to further Thai timber imports.

The Khmer Rouge and their leader were deprived of an annual revenue close to $90 million.

In the 13 months that followed, the Khmer Rouge located near the Cambodia-Thailand border eventually defected to the government, as Global Witness had effectively "cut off their income."