Resolution EC18to22FIN 062

Resolved, That Executive Council, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, October 18-21, 2019, having noted CCSR’s evaluation in the Report of its efforts over multiple years to engage with six companies in the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society portfolio, and in order to implement FIN-061 Resolution, directs that Caterpillar Inc., Motorola Solutions and the Israel Discount Bank be, and they hereby are, placed on the DFMS Human Rights No Buy List, and Council further hereby directs DFMS’s money managers to sell DFMS’s holdings in these companies as soon as possible and in a fiscally prudent manner; and be it further

Resolved, That Executive Council asks CCSR to pursue continued engagement with Facebook, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor, urging them to address human rights violations through complicity in the occupation of the OPT, and seeking to assure that the companies take all necessary steps to end their complicity in the occupation.

See FIN-061 Resolution and the CCSR Report. The companies chosen for initial consideration to place on the DFMS Human Rights No Buy List were the six companies in the DFMS portfolio with which CCSR has been seeking to carry on engagement.  CCSR has attempted to engage with two of these, Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar, for 25 and 15 years, respectively, without any progress.  A third company in the DFMS portfolio, Israel Discount Bank, did not respond to a request to meet after initially agreeing to do so. The bank is a major investor in Israeli settlements. Thus, CCSR recommends that the DFMS sell its stock in these three companies while continuing engagement with the remaining three, which have shown willingness to engage and openness to revising their business practices.

FIN-061, 062 and 063, taken together, provide a substitute for FIN-040 (withdrawn) .  Combined, they are the EC CCSR response to GC2018 B-016 “ Adopt ELCA Action on Israel/Palestine”.