The Business of Human Rights

In last week’s blog (found here), I discussed two tools that have come out to fill the need to develop human rights risk assessment. CIDSE a non profit organization that stands for “tougher global justice” recently published a policy paper that discusses a related concept “human rights due diligence.” According to the authors “This CIDSE briefing explains what human rights due diligence is and … how it should be implemented by businesses and the essential role of States in that regard.”

As the report notes, the idea of “human rights due diligence” is a newer concept that has been getting a lot of attention by businesses, civil society and policymakers. Human rights due diligence is one part of the overall risk assessment that a company should perform when undertaking an analysis of how their business affects other stakeholders. In an article that I published earlier this year (which you can fine here), I spend a lot of time discussing these concepts and how they relate: human rights due diligence and human rights risk assessment, as well as how they align with traditional due diligence and risk management concepts. The CIDSE report provides eight recommendations that for integrating the UN Guiding Principles and the Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework into existing business operations and legal structures. The recommendations seemed to be geared mainly at States and their role in protecting communities and individuals from business related human rights challenges. Among the recommendations put forth are requiring states to use the means “at their disposal” to require businesses to incorporate business and human rights issues into their operations. Another recommendation, asks states to strengthen the “regulatory process” to tie the issuance of permits with specific undertakings by businesses in human rights due diligence.

The Report does an excellent job of tying its recommendations to specific parts of the Guidelines and the Protect Framework. Moreover, the recommendations encompass both gradual and ambitious planks for those who would like to move the business and human rights agenda forward. I highly recommend that those who are interested in the policy initiatives that are being discussed now (or will be discussed in the future) to take a look at the report.

The full report can be found here.

So, the other thing that happened in Geneva is I met a woman who is part of an NGO in Spain that tries to make workers’ rights fun (yup, I said fun) using cartoons and activities. Their goal is to have 1001 activities in many different languages. Their site is here…

http://www.improvingworklife.es/

Enjoy the site. We’ll be returning to full blog status in the New Year (Friday January 10th)

Last week, I attended the Second Annual UN Forum on Business and Human Rights. 
During the Forum’s closing session, there were times to have questions and comments from the Forum participants.

The closing session was designed to highlight what issues the Working Group should focus on going forward in 2014. One of the people who went up to comment began her comments like this: “I’m a business student and I want to speak on behalf of all business students” she then made an impassioned plea for educators to begin teaching human rights in business school, saying that if there was any hope for advancing business and human rights issues in the future it needed to come from training the future leaders.

Specifically, she noted “I have not had one course or even one discussion on human rights in my school” this needed to change- she urged, to make a difference in the world.

Wherever you fall on the tax-avoidance-as-human-rights-issue spectrum, this story of a village’s act of kindness in relation to what they did with Glencore Corporation’s tax money tells another part of the story. It put me in a festive mood. Hopefully it will for you too…

A link to the story is here.

Photo (and complimentary festive mood) taken fromhttp://www.zuerich.com/en/visitors/christmas.html

One of the ongoing features of this blog has been a literature review, a series of posts that have been dedicated to reviewing the ever-increasing literature (both recent and pioneering) within the field of business and human rights.

However, sitting here at the UN Forum, I’ve realized that there is a gap in much of the material I’ve been covering – I usually just review academic articles. In focusing primarily on academic research, I’ve neglected a huge swath of publications that have been put out by state actors, international organizations, NGOs and other actors that have a direct impact on the field.

The advantage of covering these nonacademic publications is that they often offer a more timely view of the issues than academic articles with longer publication windows. They will also frequently offer a more practiced oriented approach, something that has become increasingly relevant as we move from theory to implementation.

So… to remedy that situation, I offer a New Publications section, a look at recent publications that affect the field of business and human rights.