Interaction with United Nations Special Representative John Ruggie is an eye-opener. Well, I guess he’d say “a game changer,” but however you want to phrase it, Ruggie’s work to define roles and recommend parameters for his 3 pillar approach to business and human rights is going to change the way corporations and their stakeholders view human rights.
It’s about time.
For the last couple decades environmental and human rights activists groups have increasingly targeted corporate behavior in their campaigns – there have been some noticeable campaign “victories” and positive changes.
But broadly speaking the systemic problems at the root of issues like child labor, freedom of expression remain. Figuring out the role corporations and their stakeholders can play in addressing them remains a time-intensive conundrum.
As I wrote for the World Politics Review blog:
At the center of each campaign – whether explicitly stated or not – is the quest to define business responsibilities and duties related to their own operations and in relation to the communities in which they work, the markets where they sell their products.
There has never been an accepted international norm for the role of businesses in human rights concerns. All of the existing international standards, like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, were written about government responsibility.
Ruggie’s 3 pillars: PROTECT, RESPECT and REMEDY address the roles of various players in the rights equations. For corporations Ruggie is looking at due diligence at the the key operational element; requiring companies to make policy commitments, conduct assessments on actual and potential human rights impacts of their business operations and track their performance.
This, Ruggie argues, will take corporations and their stakeholders from “name and shame” to “know and show.”
“If a company doesn’t know, then they can’t show. A claim to respect human rights is just that, a claim, not a fact,” Ruggie said. “Human rights equals social sustainability and companies have to demonstrate that.”
With clear, broadly accepted standards in place rigid positions by activist stakeholders and those they target will cease to be tenable. Every player will have a clearer idea of where they stand – and time now spent on arguing roles may be better spent elsewhere.
Ruggie will present his final findings to the UN Human Rights Council in 2011; and the Council is expected to take action to formalize his recommendations.
Even with that expected movement it will likely be a couple decades before Ruggie’s work translates into broad application or becomes an integral element of global corporate culture.
Nonetheless, several forward thinking corporations like Coca-Cola and Hewlett Packard are already exploring how Ruggie’s approach is going to change the human rights arena for the private sector and how to operationalize these concepts into their business operations.
Tags: 3 pillars, activists, business, coca-cola, hewlett packard, human rights, human rights council, john ruggie, know and show, name and shame, protect, remedy, respect, un
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