The University Board of Trustees voted unanimously Tuesday to divest from any directly-held investments in petroleum companies PetroChina, Sinopec, Tatneft and ABB, Ltd., whose operations support the Sudanese government. The Khartoum regime has been condemned worldwide for genocidal acts in the region of Darfur.

The decision, announced Wednesday, was made based on the recommendation of the Board’s Special Committee on Investment Responsibility, or SCIR. The task of divestment will now be passed to the Stanford Management Company, which will also send letters to the University’s investment managers, urging them to also divest from the four companies.

Burton McMurtry, chair of the Board of Trustees, said he expects these letters to be sent out within the next 10 days. He stressed the rarity of the decision, adding that stringent standards must be met before divestment is considered. The situation in Darfur met these standards.

“This was an odd circumstance, but it shows that we have a process that works,” McMurtry said. “Over time we’ll likely get more requests for divestiture than we can approve, but it will be done on a case-by-case basis. We need to keep the bar high.”

According to the Stanford University Statement on Investment Responsibility, the trustees can take action if they judge that a company's policies lead to “substantial social injury.”

“Divestment is an act that should be made rarely and carefully,” University President John Hennessy told the Stanford News Service. “In this case, it was clear that the genocide occurring in Darfur, which appears to be at least partly enabled by these four companies, is in direct opposition to Stanford University principles.”

The issue came to the attention of the Board when SCIR received a recommendation for divestment from the University’s Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility, or APIR, a group of faculty, staff and students that examines issues related to Stanford’s investment portfolio.

The recommendation was made after the panel was approached by the campus group Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, or STAND, which presented research on both the situation in Darfur and the companies in question. The panel voted in favor of divestment on May 24.

“I’m pleased with the students’ role in this,” said APIR member Debra Meyerson, associate professor of education. “I am impressed and I am proud of the students who started this process that led to the trustee vote. They acted carefully and heroically.”

APIR Chair George Parker, a professor at the Graduate School of Business,” agreed with McMurtry that the decision is exceptional.

“This is an exceedingly rare,” he said. “We would not anticipate another decision like this for a long time. It is not done casually, easily or quickly.”

Junior Ben Elberger, who helped lead the STAND effort, said that he was thrilled with the outcome of the Board’s vote, adding that the student group feared the decision would be delayed until the fall.

“It took Stanford students years to win divestment from companies that supported apartheid in South Africa; we are thrilled that this campaign took three months,” he said. “But, really, this was only doable because Stanford acted in good faith and made sure to move forward as quickly as possible.”

Elberger and his STAND cohorts met with Hennessy within a week of their first presentation to APIR to discuss the details of their campaign.

“Hennessy was very receptive to helping us formulate the best way to go about this,” he said. “He gave us advice on the process — the good and the bad ways to go about it.”

Elberger admitted that when STAND first began pushing for divestment — holding informational meetings and peaceful protests — members saw official divestment by June as a long-shot.

STAND member Nikki Serapio, a sophomore, said that while he expected the decision to come later as well, the group’s message benefited from the precedent set by the campaign to divest from companies operating in South Africa.

“We spent a lot of long nights compiling and composing the report we presented to APIR, but we received a lot of help from outside human rights organizations, and a lot of the information was already there,” Serapio said.

The group also gained momentum from Harvard’s April decision to divest about $4.4 million in shares of PetroChina, and the Illinois General Assembly’s move to suspend state investments in companies that do business with Sudan.

“This development has just hit us, but there is still a lot of work to be done” Serapio said of the Board’s vote. “Last week STAND went to Sacramento to lobby state senators about a resolution [similar to that approved in Illinois].”

Currently, the group is working to encourage the University of California schools to similarly divest, he said.

“The UCs have $133 million in companies doing business in Sudan, and if that effort is successful, it will be a much bigger success as far as financial impact on the Khartoum regime," Serapio said. "It will also require far more manpower.”