The Valuable 500 wants to promote disability inclusion, but instead, it is whitewashing apartheid, war crimes, corruption and genocide.

Entrepreneur Caroline Casey describes her initiative’s goal as promoting disability inclusion in the corporate and business world. In partnership with the International Disability Alliance, the Nippon Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Apple, they claim to lead a “global movement to put disability on the business leadership agenda”.  But together, they are celebrating global-scale human rights offenders as socially responsible businesses, in exchange for disability-inclusive lip-service and empty promises.    

The Valuable 500 website explains its mission to bring lasting change to more than 1.3 billion people with disabilities around the world. We agree that initiatives to make businesses and workplaces inclusive of this huge part of humanity are important. 

But lasting change requires true committment, and the sincerity of some participating businesses is highly questionable: Generic PR statements about vague corporate values is all that many of them offer. Some of them even failing to mention disability at all.

More importantly, an alarming number of Valuable 500 companies have direct responsibility in war crimes, systematic human rights violations and humanitarian catastrophes that have disabled countless people around the world. These are some examples:

1. The world’s largest weapons manufacturers: Valuable 500 members Boeing and BAE Systems are the world’s second largest weapons manufacturer and UK’s largest weapons manufacturer respectively. These two companies have profited from virtually every armed conflict that has taken place in recent decades, and they are top suppliers of weapons to Saudi Arabia’s illegal war against Yemen. The WHO estimates that more than 4.5 million Yemenis with disabilities are among the most affected in what the UN currently considers the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
2. Promoters of apartheid and the dispossession of indigenous people, their land and resources: Companies Alstom, AirBnB, Bank Hapoalim, Bezeq, Delek Group, Expedia, Cellcom, Egged Ta’avura, Partner 5G, Pelephone, Shufersal, and Yes are implicated in war crimes and profiting from the Illegal occupation of Palestine. They supply electricity, telecommunications and financial investments to illegal settlements, and profit from water, land and other natural resources stolen from occupied land. 
3. Investors in Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide: According to the UN Fact-Finding Mission in Myanmar, Valuable 500 member KBZ Group is a crony partner of the country’s military junta in jade and ruby mining, and has donated nearly US$2.5 million to support the genocidal military campaign against the Rohingya people in 2017.
4. Global corruption: Valuable 500 member Menora Mivtachim is one of Israel’s largest financial institutions. In 2018, the company was under US federal investigation for a secret USD 30 million investment in the Kushner family-owned real estate developments, while Mr. Kushner was acting as Middle East envoy of former president Trump.

The Valuable 500 is offering a white-washing opportunity for unscrupulous businesses, who have direct responsibility in oppression, theft, enabling apartheid, war profiteering and genocide. And the disability rights community is inadvertently enabling this through the partnership of the International Disability Alliance, a leading international organization with Valuable 500.

By praising these businesses as Champions of disability inclusion, the Valuable 500 obfuscates their crimes and enables impunity, all at the expense of the most disenfranchised peoples in the world--including millions of people with disabilities. 

Tell the Valuable 500 to #DropTheDespicable.