Contact: John Harrington – 707.252.6166
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 17, 2006
Napa, California
Human Rights Resolution Off Oracle Shareholder Ballot
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) informed shareholders that it would allow Oracle Corporation to omit an advisory resolution from the 2006 shareholder ballot regarding the corporation's support of technology that denies basic human or labor rights pursuant to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"The SEC has denied Oracle shareholders the right to vote on a resolution requesting that the company no longer sell technology to any foreign government that can knowingly be used to deny basic human rights," said John Harrington, President and CEO of Harrington Investments, Inc. (HII), the primary filer of the shareholder resolution. "In China and in other totalitarian and authoritarian government controlled countries, companies such as Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, Yahoo, IBM and others sell an array of technology products, which use the technology to spy on their citizens, often leading to their arrest, detention, imprisonment, torture and frequently death."
The HII resolution quoted several sources, including the 2005 U.S. State Department report on China, indicating that Chinese citizens are routinely monitored by security services, including the monitoring of personal email, text messaging and Internet communications. The report also cited an increasing use of government violence against its citizens, including arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings.
"Increasingly, U.S. technology companies are making money assisting governments in violating human and labor rights. Not unlike the policy of the Communist government of China, the SEC, a U.S. regulatory agency, is denying shareholders the right to vote on an important corporate policy. It seems that the SEC and the Chinese government see eye to eye on the concept of democracy," Harrington concluded.
HII also introduced the identical resolution at both Cisco Systems and Microsoft Corporation.
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