As businesses have expanded beyond boundaries, they've exceeded the grasp of many national laws and norms. What standards should exist for how businesses affect people's lives? Christine Bader, Advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights answers
To what extent is there a global understanding of business's responsibilities for human rights?
I think there is a much greater understanding of corporate responsibilities with respect to human rights now than there was even four years ago, but that understanding is probably still limited to a small circle of businesses, NGOs, governments, and organizations that have been active participants in the debate.
After the media coverage of sweatshops in the 1980s and then, in the 1990s, some of the dreadful things that happened around some oil, gas, and mining projects, the general public started rightly paying attention to businesses' impacts on human rights.
While business has become global, there's no corresponding growth in government systems. Governments, by definition, are meant to oversee what goes on in a particular country, and their jurisdiction is confined by their territory. There's no robust international system of regulation. So, in response to that, some people started to suggest that because companies are so big and powerful, they should have the same responsibilities as governments with respect to human rights. That is to respect, protect, promote, and fulfill, to use the UN's language.
This became the basis for a proposal at the UN in 2003. Some campaigning NGOs thought this should be the basis for a new international law or treaty on business and human rights. You can imagine that some businesses reacted very differently. Governments largely stood aside.
So, this proposal bounced around the UN for a couple of years, and there was a pretty contentious debate over it, and then the Commission on Human Rights, which is now the Human Rights Council, in 2005 voted it down. But they recommended that the Secretary General appoint a special representative on the topic of business and human rights to bring some clarity to this debate.
They appointed a Kennedy School professor named John Ruggie to do that. He started by asking, "What are the human rights abuses that have been linked to corporations? Where are they happening? How are companies being held accountable?"
John has had multi-stakeholder consultations with businesses, with NGOs, and with governments in dozens of countries. Through all that work, he realized what was missing, and that was an overarching conceptual framework to manage business and human rights. If we couldn't agree on the fundamental principles, how on earth could we go forward and develop specific solutions?
The framework he presented to the Human Rights Council last year consists of three pillars: protect, respect, and remedy.
The first one, protect, concentrates on government duties. It's about the state duty to protect people against human rights abuses that are linked to corporations. That's a fundamental part of the human rights system. But what we found is that that duty has not been consistently or rigorously applied to corporations. Either Western governments don't want to regulate their companies' operations overseas, saying it's not in their jurisdiction, or host governments don't want to be ungracious hosts when they're getting foreign direct investment.
So you get this policy incoherence where governments sign up to human rights conventions but don't implement them consistently.
Is there a downside to broad consensus? Is the framework weaker than it might be, for example?
I suppose that when some people hear that the baseline responsibility of companies is simply to respect human rights that might seem like a low standard. But I need to clarify what that means. What John Ruggie has suggested is that companies need to undertake human rights due diligence to make sure they're not infringing on the rights of others. This isn't a passive responsibility; it requires proactive steps, which to undertake thoroughly is actually quite a high bar.
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Qn, a publication of the Yale School of Management http://qn.som.yale.edu]