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On the other hand you are not publishing the names and data of all the companies you have scrutinised, but for different reasons did not exclude. What is the reason for this? Your work could obviously be even more helpful to other ethical investors if they could also share your knowledge about acceptable companies.

Gro Nystuen Well, there are many problems with that. We have discussed it, obviously, many times. One problem is that publishing a list of companies that we are looking at causes itself reputational hazard for a company. It shows that they are under our scrutiny. And if we then publicized the details of all the companies we have looked at and decided not to exclude them from our investment programme, it would mean that we gave them a seal of quality, which we do not want to do. Some companies can be really bad, we know that but we just can’t get the documentation. And we do not want to give those companies a quality seal. And some companies, on the other hand, are falsely accused of things, for a number of reasons. Many people out there have very specific agendas. They are using companies to push forward their own causes. We have had accusations against very famous companies like Coca Cola. If you have Coca Cola in your headline you will almost automatically receive attention. Many companies are named to us in this manner and when we look at them, we discover that there is no story at all. In those cases, it would be very unfair to that company to make public that they were in our search line.

You make it clear that the ethical guidelines of the work of the Council on Ethics are not primarily rooted in a separate Norwegian culture or policy, but rely largely on internationally accepted principles. Which principles are these?

Gro Nystuen According to our mandate, we recommend exclusion of companies roughly for two reasons; either because of the goods they produce, which mostly pertains to the production of specific weapons; or

because of their conduct regarding human rights, the environment and corruption. Our mandate highlights three items in this regard. The first concerns violations of human rights treaties. The second concerns the rights of individuals in situations of war and conflict. At issue here are humanitarian law and treaties that pertain to armed conflict, but not exclusively. It is a somewhat vaguer point, which is good, because it allows us to exclude companies involved in unethical behaviour in areas of armed conflict without having to invoke violations of a specific treaty. It is sufficient to state that their conduct is unethical. The third point concerns environmental damage. The environmental criteria are absolutely not attached to any treaty, because if they were, they would be very narrow. For example there is no international prohibition against cutting down every tree in Norway, although it would be clearly bad to do it. So we are not constrained by the absence of treaties when it comes to the environment. The same is true with regard to corruption. We can and do of course rely on the UN anti-corruption treaty when we are dealing with corruption. But the definition of corruption in the UN treaty might be too far reaching in some cases and then we might want to make it narrower. We nevertheless rely on it as a point of reference. Some of our guidelines refer to treaties, some don’t. The first part of our mandate concerns manufacturers of weapons where the normal use is likely to violate fundamental human rights principles such as the principle of distinction and the principle of proportionality. The principle of distinction allows for a clear distinction between civilians and military targets. Since 2005 we have been excluding all manufacturers of weapons that violated it. Chemical weapons and biological weapons, of course, also do not allow for a distinction between civilian and military targets. We also listed cluster weapons which were still then not prohibited and nuclear weapons, which are also not prohibited for the permanent members of the Security Council, for political reasons. The nuclear weapons were politically particularly controversial, because Norway is a member of NATO. We are under the nuclear umbrella, so it was difficult for our Ministry of Defence to explain in

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