"Freeport seems to be breaking new ground here, and groups like Amnesty International will be watching closely to see what other companies do," says John O'Reilly, an Amnesty volunteer who until 2003 headed the human-rights program at BP...Unprecedented as it is, the Freeport-ICCA [Intl. Center for Corporate Accountability] collaboration took more than a year just to set up, as the two groups worked out what the audit would entail and how it would be done. The ICCA...hired four professors and 10 grad students from the University of Papua New Guinea who speak the local languages to conduct interviews of employees and managers. Then the group developed four questionnaires for different parts of the operation and used them to do 373 interviews individually -- with no Freeport managers present. ICCA took the results to New York for analysis without showing anything to Freeport management. The result: an unvarnished view of what really goes on. It remains to be seen whether other companies will subject themselves to similar scrutiny. [refers to steps by Nike, Liz Claiborne, Reebok, Walt Disney, Wal-Mart]