Berlin, 21 April 2006 — Huguette Labelle, Chair of Transparency International, has enthusiastically accepted an invitation from United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to join the Board of the UN Global Compact, a voluntary corporate citizenship initiative with over 3000 corporate and stakeholder members.

“Transparency International fought hard to make transparency and accountability core principles of the UN Global Compact,” said Labelle. “Serving on its Board is an extraordinary opportunity to foster the further development and implementation of those principles in concert with the private sector. Voluntary programmes such as this are powerful tools to achieve consensus, and are a welcome complement to legal regimes.”

The Compact, launched in July 2000, serves to “bring companies together with UN agencies, labour and civil society to support universal environmental and social principles”. In a series of consultative meetings in 2004, Transparency International founder and former chairman Peter Eigen successfully pushed for the inclusion of transparency and anti-corruption as the tenth principle of the global compact.

The Global Compact is an excellent example of the coalition-based approach that TI supports and that is essential in tackling today’s interwoven global social, political and economic problems.

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