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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 48 Panel 4 Trading with China: risks, responsibilities & opportunities moderator: Sharon Hom Executive Director, Human Rights in China Matchmaking human rights and business interests Kathryn Dovey Program Manager, Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights In 2003, the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights published a document called the UN Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights. This, for the first time, was a set of human rights standards aimed directly at businesses which took for their reference international human rights treaties. What happened as a result was a fairly polarized debate. On one side, a number of companies said human rights was for governments and not really any of their business. On the other side, there were NGOs that said the measure did not go far enough. There were obviously variations. A number of companies, not many, were behind the idea of at least trying to clarify the issue. Two months before the UN document came out, seven multinational corporations set up the Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights. It 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 effort involved developing 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 number of examples in the various boxes - that companies can use for reference. The Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights has a variety of industry sectors meeting together and that would not ordinarily sit around the same table, meeting together on these issues - the pharmaceutical sector, the apparels sector, mining, oil, information technology and others. The idea is that, together, they can explore the common dilemmas over the relations between human rights and business concerns and seek solutions.
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 49 We work with legal advisers and try very much to bring human rights to a business audience. One of the main publications on which we worked. A Guide for Integrating Human Rights into Business Management - 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 kinds of opportunities to be found in this area. Throughout 2006-2009, the second stage of the project, we have been delving deeper 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 increased interest from governments on this issue, Ironically, some companies, not all by any means, are more advanced on this subject than governments are. Prof. John G. Ruggie, was appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2005 as the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights. This appointment arose out of the debate surrounding the UN Norms. Professor Ruggie was appointed to do some mapping in this area and to understand it better. Ruggie's mandate included identifying corporate responsibility standards, elaborating the role of the states, building 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 - protect, respect and remedy - which it is hoped will be endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2008. 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 human rights violations do 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 looking at the right to health; information technology companies and freedom of information; apparel companies and their supply chains. It is important to note, however,
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