Business and human rights
Kathryn Dovey
Programme Manager, Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights (BLIHR) ; Programme Director, Entreprises pour les droits de l'homme (EDH)

In 2003, the UN Commission on Human Rights published a document called the UN Human Rights Norms for Business. This for the first time was a set of standards aimed directly at businesses, which could thereby used as a reference the international treaties that states had signed up to .

What happened as a result was pretty much a polarized debate. You had on the one side a number of companies that said human rights was for governments and not really their business. On the other hand were non-government organizations that said the measure did not go far enough.

There were obviously variants.  A number of companies, not many, were behind the idea of at least trying to clarify the issue.

Two months before this UN document came out, seven multinational corporations set up the Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights, which is chaired by Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and the former UN high commissioner for human rights.

Today, 13 companies belong to the initiative. To focus their work, the companies took the UN norms document and tried to road test it to see if it would work in a business context. Part of this was to build tools that companies could use to try to translate human rights into a business context while using business-friendly language. One of those tools was a matrix published in 2003 -- in which we took the contents of the norms and then divided corporate actions into essential, expected and desirable with a whole bunch of examples in the various boxes - that companies can use for reference.

The Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights has a variety of sectors which would not ordinarily be sitting around the table together on these issues. - the pharmaceutical sector, the apparels  sector, mining oil, information technology  and others . The idea is that together they can raise up the common dilemmas in this area and work out ways of solving them.

We work with legal advisers and try very much to bring human rights into a business audience. One of the main publications on which we worked. A Guide for Integrating Human Rights into Business Management - it is also available in Chinese - quite simply takes the elements of a standard management system and explains how human rights slots into it. It explains things you need to be looking out for, but also the kind of opportunities to be found in this area.

Throughout 2006-2009, the second stage of the project, we are drilling down into more thematic areas toward the difficult questions, looking at the issue of emerging economies, at the question of accountability and good governance in sensitive countries.

What we have been seeing particularly over the last year is the raised interest from governments on this issue, It is ironic in a way that some companies, not all by any means, are more in advance on this subject than governments are.

I now come to Professor John G. Ruggie, the UN special representative on business and human rights, who was appointed by Kofi Annan in 2005 as part of the norms process. The norms were never going to become an international treaty, but states decided that a good compromise would be to appoint somebody for a period of three years to really do some mapping in this area and better understand it.

Ruggie's mandate included identifying corporate responsibility, elaborating the role of the states and building a system of human rights impact assessments, as well as compiling a compendium of best practices.

His latest report proposes a framework for action, based on three elements - protection, respect and remedy - which it is hoped will be adopted by the UN Human Rights Council.

Protection is about what states should be doing in relation to companies. Because states have signed the international treaties, they have an obligation to ensure that other actors including companies are not violating human rights.

Respect, which is the most interesting for us, is about the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, that is not to violate them.

Remedy, also extremely important, is about access to justice when violations occur.

I should mention for those of you who are journalists an excellent web site called The Business and Human Rights Resources Center  (www.business-humanrights.org) where you will find stories about violations relating to companies and the responses from those companies in a very balanced debate.

There is a great deal happening in sector-specific areas -  pharmaceutical companies and the right to health; information technology companies and freedom of information; apparel companies and their supply chains.  It is important to mention that all human rights can be of relevance to all companies in this debate, in spite of the fact they might be interested in drilling down on work that relates specifically to their sector.

Also of interest is the role of the industry bodies such as the International Chamber of Commerce or the International Organization of Employers. These traditionally conservative bodies in December 2006 did a report for John Ruggie, which stated that in weak governance zones where the law is insufficient, companies should be making reference to international human rights standards. That was pretty progressive at the time

Another point worth questioning is the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes - what are governments saying to governments and what should they be saying? And how transparent should they be?

Within the Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights there are two sponsors of the Olympic Games, Coca Cola and General Electric. What is their role? What is their responsibility?  These are difficult questions.

It is worth noting that despite a lot of good work going on around business and human rights, there is still a long way to go. There is still a large number of companies that are not necessarily engaged in these issues yet. Nevertheless, over the last three years we have seen huge progress in the area.