Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA) and Bhopal Resource Action Center Records

The Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA) was founded in 1954 as a nonprofit human rights, education, research and publishing group, with an international outlook, and with a particular emphasis on corporate accountability and social responsibility, prompted in part by the Bhopal, India disaster occurred in 1984 at a Union Carbide Pesticide plant in which a leak of toxic gas killed some 8,000 people immediately, a like number in succeeding years, and caused thousands of permanent disabilities, notably blindness.

CIPA has sponsored various projects and organizations, notably the Bhopal Resource Action Center, the International Coalition for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), Apex Press (its publishing arm), as well as the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), the Intermediate Technology Development Group, and the Global Information Network (GIN), a distributor of developing country news services. CIPA also seeks remedies for human rights violations, primarily by exposing the roots of corporate power in the U.S. and worldwide. Ward Morehouse (b. 1929), CIPA's founder and now its president emeritus, taught Political Science at New York University and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Lund in Sweden and the Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad. He has also been a consultant to various United Nations agencies, and is the author or editor of some twenty books, including Building Sustainable Communities, The Bhopal Tragedy, Abuse of Power: The Social Performance of Multinational Corporations, Worker Empowerment in a Changing Economy, and The Underbelly of the U.S. Economy. A resident of Northampton, MA, Morehouse is also a co-founder of the Western Massachusetts Committee on Corporations and Democracy with his wife, Carolyn Toll Oppenheim, CIPA's interim Executive Director and a former journalist and journalism professor.