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: Law at the End of the Day

Business and Human Rights Part XII--Elaboration; Applicability to All Business

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This Blog Essay site devotes every February to a series of integrated but short essays on a single theme. The Ruminations Series in 2009 produced a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope was that, built up on each other, the series would provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions.

For 2010, this site introduces a new series--Business and Human Rights. The series takes as its starting point the issues and questions raised by John Ruggie, the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) on business and human rights, in a global online forum
The U.N. "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework is made up of three pillars: the State duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business; the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, which means to avoid infringing on the rights of others; and greater access by victims to effective remedy, judicial and non-judicial. The forum is currently focused on the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, the second pillar of the framework. The forum is divided into sections, each of which contains multiple topics with space for discussion and comment.
New Online Forum for U.N. Business and Human Rights Mandate, United Nations Press Release, New York and Geneva, Dec. 1, 2009. Each of the Essays will consider one of the topics raised in the online consultation. My hope is to help generate discussion and to encourage further discussion of the issues within the framework fo the consultation framework.

Part XII: Human Rights Due Diligence--Elaboration: Applicability to All Business. IN PROGRESS

The SRSG has has forcefully and correctly suggested that the Second Pillar responsibility to respect is not subject to threshholds of size or operation. "The corporate responsibility to respect human rights applies to all business enterprises regardless of size, industry, region or ownership. The scope of the responsibility to respect human rights is determined by a company's activities and relationships, not its revenues or number of employees. All companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, which requires human rights due diligence; but the resultant company activities will vary depending on the particular context and circumstances." United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business & Human Rights, Elaboration: Applicability to All Business.

Yet, the SRSG conceeds that such a broad extension of the responsibility to protect raises special issues in at least two cases. The first are issues special to small and medium sized firms. The second are to state owned enterprises (SOEs). I would add two additional categories. The first are sovereign wealth funds, especially those taking a substantial position of shares of companies that themselves might encounter human righrs issues in the operations. The second are small and medium sized enterprises whose operations do not cross borders. Lastly, it might be important ot consider issues of "reverse flow." It is well understood that larger corporations' responsibility to respect human rights extends downstream through the supply chain. Less well understood is the possibility of reverse obligation--that is of the responsibility of local companies, for example companies in host states, to respect human rights extending upwards in their relationships with larger enterprises.

Full post as published by Law at the End of the Day on February 13, 2010 (boomark / email).