Everyone's favourite oil and mining multinational companies - including BP, Shell, Rio Tinto and De Beers - are all getting together for a £400 a head talk shop this Tuesday & Wednesday (26th-27th October). So why's that news - these corporate love-ins are a regular event for your jet-setting corporate-types? Well this time they're getting together with some big UK charities (like Oxfam, Amnesty and International Alert) to find common ground (or is that to enclose it) on the subjext of "Business Action on Human Rights". I kid you not.

Organised for the magazine 'Ethical Corporation', the whole conference is geared towards how these companies who deal in extracting profit from resources from under the land of displaced or affected communities can deal with the resulting 'issues' (for example the armed insurrection of the people of Bougainville against the Rio Tinto owned Panguna copper mine).

Sessions include "Extractive industries: Managing plant security issues"(such as how you keep your mercenaries in ammunition) and "What are the limits of business responsibility for human rights?" (bugger all if you can get away with it). The phrase 'green-wash' was coined for large companies buying off and stealing the language of environmental groups, now we appear to have 'red-wash' to get rid of that unwanted blood on your hands.

The mystery seems to be why so many of the big NGOs are happy to engage with corporations on their terms at an event like this. It is perhaps no surprise that members of affected communities have not been asked to put their side of what human rights mean. (but then on any compensation they may receive I don't suppose they could afford to a cup of tea at the conference venue, the Regents Part Marriott Hotel, let alone the £400 entrance fee).

More information on the conference, for those that may want to pop by to give them a different perspective is at www.ethicalcorp.com/humanrights/programme.shtml. More information on the companies involved is at www.minesandcommunities.org or www.nonewoil.org.