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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Human rights pressure on business
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Human rights pressure on business

The forthcoming session of the United Nations Human Rights Council will see sharpening of focus on compliance by businesses

The fact that there is unabated pressure to make application of human rights in business more robust and accountable will only raise the stakes for better delivery of remedial action. Photo: Hindustan TimesPremium
The fact that there is unabated pressure to make application of human rights in business more robust and accountable will only raise the stakes for better delivery of remedial action. Photo: Hindustan Times

Accountability and liability of transnational businesses for messing with human rights is no longer questioned. Recent debate, or more precisely, a sharpening of focus has been over what proponents term a global, legally binding instrument that will ensure compliance by such businesses. It will likely make an impact in the forthcoming March session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The matter was flagged at the September meeting of the council in Geneva. Several countries pushed for such a mechanism as an issue-based conglomerate comprising the African group, Arab group and several countries from Central and South America and Asia, among them Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Sri Lanka.

The group released a statement pressing for “appropriate protection, justice and remedy to the victims of human rights abuses directly resulting from or related to the activities of some transnational corporations and other businesses enterprises".

It was a call to bolster the guiding principles on business and human rights that United Nations Human Rights Council endorsed in 2011. Built on the precept of protect-respect-remedy, it urges governments to protect human rights values in business, urges businesses to respect human rights, and encourages remedial mechanisms to aid victims of human rights abuses by businesses.

These are just so many words, meaningless without active application of human rights by both governments and businesses. Patchy political will, weak enforcement of law, and diplomatic and financial pressure brought to bear by hugely influential businesses routinely permit them to escape censure and penalty even in this era of heightened and somewhat globalized activism and media. Some countries simply lack the clout to take on transnational businesses. And so the UN’s guiding principles have unsurprisingly been described as “a first step without further consequence".

“An international legally binding instrument concluded within the UN system," urged the group of countries, “would clarify the obligations of transnational corporations in the field of human rights, as well as of corporations in relation to States, and provide for the establishment of effective remedies for victims in cases where domestic jurisdiction is clearly unable to prosecute effectively those companies."

The suggestion to harden the ambit of law and its globalized delivery, a sort of International Court of Justice for business-related human rights violations, is of course fraught with complications. That sense was offered earlier this week by the key author of the UN guiding principles of business and human rights, John G. Ruggie.

These days a professor of human rights and international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Ruggie, in a brief on 28 January, urged caution and reflection. His basic point didn’t contest weaknesses highlighted by several critics of the UN guiding principles, but instead offered as reality the adoption of the principles by various countries through national action plans (late off-the-blocks and still-suspect India among them), influential multilateral groupings like the European Union (through its new corporate social responsibility policy and mandatory non-financial reporting requirements, as Ruggie puts it), and various intergovernmental review mechanisms in groups like Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the African Union.

Ruggie concedes that such application is in great part via dissemination and not implementation and enforcement (“…no systematic assessment is available of overall results to date… There are only anecdotal fragments…"), but he raises practical issues of a legally and globally binding instrument of compliance. These are “quite apart from the doctrinal debate about corporations as ‘subjects’ of international law", Ruggie maintains. “For instance, is it plausible that governments could agree on a single global corporate liability standard for every internationally recognized human right? And if only limited rights, which ones would they be, and on what basis would they be selected?"

“Even more fundamental," Ruggie continues, “how would such a treaty be enforced—inadequate enforcement being the main shortcoming of the current system? Would it require establishing an international court for corporations? Or would it be enforced by states?"

There can be no doubt that massive dissemination of UN guiding principles has in the space of three years ensured their inclusion on the agenda of several governments, business associations, several individual corporate social responsibility platforms, and reinforced the to-do lists of human rights lawyers and activists. And Ruggie’s point about the ultimate responsibility resting with both businesses and governments is well taken.

But the fact that there is unabated pressure to make application of human rights in business more robust and accountable will only raise the stakes for better delivery of remedial action. I’d watch out for the ideas of March.

Sudeep Chakravarti is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business. Respond to this column at rootcause@livemint.com

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Published: 30 Jan 2014, 08:42 PM IST
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