Human Rights and the Corporation

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:03 -0500

Human Rights and the Corporation

by Reed Addis

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In this notebook Reed Addis describes the development of the Human Rights Compliance Assessment by the Danish Institute for Human Rights. The Compliance Assessment, based somewhat on the model of an Environmental Impact Assessment, was developed through a long process of consultation with businesses from many different industrial sectors, and provides a framework through which businesses can assess their human rights obligations and measure the liabilities and human rights risks in countries where they operate or plan to locate. The tool helps companies understand human rights law, but can also help human rights groups understand companies and learn to communicate with the corporate world about human rights questions in a more constructive way.

In 1999, a small project was initiated between the Danish Institute for Human Rights and the Danish Confederation of Industries. Their goal was to create an assessment tool companies could use to evaluate potential violations of human rights in their operations. Up until that point, businesses who were looking for human rights guidance in most cases found only information about labor law, for example via the International Labor Organization. The Human Rights Compliance Assessment was designed to fill this void. It has several sections, with the bulk of the document made up of 350 questions a company needs to ask itself. The questions were designed to cover the entire breadth of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

While governments are ultimately responsible for upholding the human rights afforded us by various international treaties, businesses can have a disproportionate impact on the activities of governments, either supporting or undercutting government actions. Over the last 20 to 30 years, a wealth of examples have been collected that demonstrate that companies can help protect the rights of individuals, or they can deal them devastating blows. Human rights advocates have accordingly begun to invest energy in focusing attention on the conduct of corporations, to push them to behave better, on occasion pulling them along to better human rights in their operations. This developing focus has been critical to adding protections for our human rights. But why this focus now? Over the last 50 years, corporations have increasingly extended their operations beyond the country where they are headquartered. This means a corporation with headquarters in one country may sell their products in several countries, while the products they sell may be made in yet another country thousands of miles away.

Many factors have contributed to this dynamic, but it is obvious that the production and marketing strategies of today are fundamentally different than they were a half century ago. Numerous international treaties, conventions and declarations identify human rights that governments and all members of society should uphold. Several international organizations, such as the International Labor Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the United Nations Global Compact, have also spelled out human rights obligations specific to private companies. However, if an advocacy group wishes to engage a corporation in a constructive dialogue on the issue of human rights, they must know both "languages": the language of the business world and that of international human rights law. Without this capacity, advocates are left discussing what seem to their corporate contacts like very vague concepts. These discussions may or may not lead to agreements and often refer to rather ambiguous changes for business operations or structure. It is clear to me after many meetings with human rights advocates that they often struggle to identify concrete changes they can offer to a corporation for improviving human rights protections.

This paper will outline how a new assessment tool, the Human Rights Compliance Assessment, designed at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, can help advocacy organizations confront human rights abuses linked to corporate activities and help corporations assess their own human rights performance. To understand the importance of this tool, we need to reframe human rights issues as "the company problem" and look for windows of opportunity to help corporations address these issues more productively. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires a willingness to see the problems through the business lens and to build alliances that will be credible in the eyes of the business community. NGOs who get involved in this task need to establish their own credibility and build trust, so that businesses can engage in dialogue and implement changes without the fear that their efforts will be used against them.

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protection, advocate

Human Rights and the Corporation

Human Rights and the Corporation