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UN Report on Businesses and Human Rights

Business relationships are often directly linked to human rights violations.

A UN report, “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework,” will be submitted to the UN Human Rights Council during the June 2011 session.

The report has three pillars (page 4, item 6):

  • The State has a duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business enterprises, through appropriate policies, regulation, and adjudication
  • Corporations have a responsibility to respect human rights, which means that business enterprises should act with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others and to address adverse impacts with which they are involved
  • There is a need for greater access by victims to effective remedies, both judicial and non-judicial

The 1990s was a time of huge corporate growth. The work of the author of the report, UN Special Representative John Ruggie, was originally to simply “identify and clarify” standards and practices of expanding businesses. It evolved into thousands of pages of evidence of human rights violations perpetrated by global  corporations.

The three pillars, or guidelines, apply to all states, businesses and corporations globally. From page 8:

“Guidance to business enterprises on respecting human rights should indicate expected outcomes and help share best practices. It should advise on appropriate methods, including human rights due diligence, and how to consider effectively issues of gender, vulnerability and/or marginalization, recognizing the specific challenges that may be faced by indigenous peoples, women, national or ethnic minorities, religious and linguistic minorities, children, persons with disabilities, and migrant workers and their families.”

Many corporations have official statements regarding their stance on human rights issues: AstraZeneca, Boeing, BP, British American Tobacco, Coca-Cola, and even McDonald’s have Standards of Business Conduct and statements related to human rights violations. You can read many of them here.  Some, like Anglo America, have these statements available but do not always follow them. Or at least, find loopholes around them.

Anglo American is one of the companies that left the mining industry in Zambia much worse off than before it came.  According to Friends of the Earth International, the company failed to uphold environmental standards and abandoned the mines two years after acquiring them.

Anglo American’s own statement reads much differently.

On January 11, 2011, John Ruggie held a conference hosted by the Business and Human Rights Resource Center. Watch a video of victims of human rights violations presented at the conference. The victims are presented around minute 3:15.

Read the report in full UN report here.  This report is the culmination of decades long research linking global businesses to human rights violations.  I hope that, from this point on, serious improvements will be made. According to Ruggie,

“[U.N. Human Rights] Council endorsement of the Guiding Principles, by itself, will not bring business and human rights challenges to an end. But it will mark the end of the beginning: by establishing a common global platform for action, on which cumulative progress can be built, step-by-step, without foreclosing any other promising longer-term developments…The Guiding Principles’ normative contribution lies not in the creation of new international law obligations but in elaborating the implications of existing standards and practices for States and businesses; integrating them within a single, logically coherent and comprehensive template, and identifying where the current regime falls short and how it should be improved.”

Next up, Friday, April 22:  Linking Poverty to Human Trafficking

 

Author

Crystal Huskey

Crystal Huskey is a freelance writer, musician and fair trade arts consultant. She has a B.A. in religion and will graduate with her M.A. in international relations in the spring of 2012. She is passionate about human rights and gender equality.

Growing up as the daughter of missionaries to refugee communities has given Huskey a heart for the outcasts and brokenhearted. She believes that much of the world's crime can be prevented by creating economic opportunities at every level of society.