The U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) is being urged to back a resolution next month to draw up a binding accord that would ensure both accountability and mechanisms for redress by victims of corporate rights abuse. Credit: Omid Memarian/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 7 2014 (IPS)

Some 500 global groups are calling for action by governments next month to jumpstart the process of drafting an international treaty to address rights abuses by multinational corporations, following on a related proposal by Ecuador and others.

On Wednesday, a global network of civil society groups known as the Treaty Alliance called on members of the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) to back a resolution next month to draw up a binding accord that would ensure both accountability and mechanisms for redress by victims of corporate rights abuse. The council will hold its 26th session Jun. 9-27 in Geneva."We believe there is no greater threat to human rights and democracy in the world today than unchecked corporate power.” -- David Pred

The Treaty Alliance’s joint statement, signed by more than 150 organisations and representing hundreds more, underscores “the need to enhance the international legal framework, including international remedies, applicable to State action to protect rights in the context of business operations, and mindful of the urgent need to ensure access to justice and remedy and reparations for victims of corporate human rights abuse.”

The statement also calls on member states to work towards a binding agreement that “affirms the applicability of human rights obligations to the operations of transnational corporations and other business enterprises” and requires states to “provide for legal liability for business enterprises for acts or omissions that infringe human rights”.

The alliance is urging the creation of a supra-national body to oversee any eventual treaty’s implementation.

“A system of binding rules to hold corporations legally liable for violations of human rights is an idea whose time has come,” David Pred, the managing director of Inclusive Development International, a watchdog group and member of the Treaty Alliance, told IPS.

“Transnational corporations have been literally getting away with murder for far too long, but rather than reining them in, our governments are ceding big businesses ever more power through free trade agreements and investment treaties. We have joined this call because we believe there is no greater threat to human rights and democracy in the world today than unchecked corporate power.”

85-country support

For decades calls have been made for a strengthened international framework on corporate rights obligations and their redress. This movement has been partly successful, culminating in the 2011 endorsement by the U.N. HRC of what are known as the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

While seen as a major step forward by many, the Guiding Principles were hobbled from the beginning in that they are voluntary.

“Ultimately there are no means to ensure enforcement of the Guiding Principles, and what we’ve seen since 2011 is that the implementation of the Guiding Principles has not worked as a barrier to human rights violations by trans-national corporations,” Gonzalo Berron, an associate fellow at the Transnational Institute and a Treaty Alliance organiser, told IPS.

“We’re not saying that we don’t want the Guiding Principles to be applied and promoted – this is a parallel process, but we think that the sooner we start discussing a binding code the better. And now we have an opportunity to move forward with that.”

Indeed, advocates of a binding treaty say the current environment, in the lead-up to the HRC’s June session, is uniquely conducive.

“Before we’ve generally seen mobilisation among affected communities and specific NGOs, but for the first time you’re now seeing this huge alliance of different campaigns – this is something new at the international level,” Berron says.

This momentum can be traced to last September. At that time, during the HRC’s 24th session, a group of 85 countries put out a joint statement noting that the Guiding Principles are “only a partial answer” and emphasising “the necessity of moving forward towards a legally binding framework to regulate the work of transnational corporations”.

Supporters note that the letter constitutes the first time in decades that the issue has been initiated directly by U.N. member states.

“This more recent momentum stems from the will of the representatives of many countries in many regions, not by U.N. entities, which has greater democratic meaning and significance inside and outside the United Nations,” Dominic Renfrey, a programme officer with the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, told IPS.

Member states sit on the HRC for three-year stints. Renfrey notes that the current composition of the 47-member council could be an advantage for supporters of a treaty push.

“At this moment a number of members of the Human Rights Council are states that understand better than most what the impact on their people is from poorly regulated development,” he says. “As such these states stand to benefit from an international system that better protects the human rights of their people, while ensuring a more sustainable and respectful form of investment.”

Enforcement quandary

Still, the idea of a treaty isn’t being embraced by all parties, including strong supporters of strengthened corporate rights obligations and mechanisms for accountability and redress.

“While we are closely following these developments, we remain focused on the critical gaps that exist in ensuring that governments live up to their duty to protect human rights,” Amol Mehra, director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, a global coalition, told IPS.

“Such gaps can be meaningfully addressed through regulation of corporations to prevent potential human rights violations both at home and abroad, and through strong remedial measures, including legal avenues of accountability, when harms do occur.”

Further, the leading figure behind the U.N. Guiding Principles has been urging caution in the push towards a treaty. In part, says John Ruggie, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on business and human rights, the problem is that the issues involved in corporate rights obligations are too vast for a single treaty.

Likewise, Ruggie wrote last week, there are some 80,000 multinational corporations in existence and millions of subsidiaries, and official reporting on these companies’ adherence to the treaty would be well beyond the capacity of most governments. Such concerns would be echoed for any supra-national body created to offer related oversight.

The fundamental problems of enforcement would be particularly exacerbated by governments’ hesitancy to prosecute for abuses committed outside of their territories – a significant problem given that treaties are consensus documents.

“[T]o add value any new treaty enforcement provision would have to involve extraterritorial jurisdiction,” Ruggie wrote.

“Some UN human rights treaty bodies have urged the home states of multinationals to provide greater extraterritorial protection against corporate-related human rights abuses … But state conduct generally makes it clear that they do not regard this to be an acceptable means to address violations of the entire array of internationally recognized human rights.”

Shareholders are calling on 15 U.S.-based multinational corporations to ensure that their global supply chains are not facilitating human rights abuses, particularly labour and sex trafficking.

A sex worker near the central station in Rome. Credit: Pier Paolo Cito/Save the Children

In a new campaign running throughout January, the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which represents 300 shareholder organisations managing around 100 billion dollars in assets, is focusing on two sectors in particular, hospitality and food agriculture. These industries – which include hotels, airlines, restaurant chains, large retailers and agribusiness companies – are seen as particularly at risk for rights violations.

“To properly fight abuses like human trafficking, we all have a role to play – and business must become part of the solution through putting into practice respect for human rights and ensuring their partners, suppliers, subsidiaries and agents do the same,” Amol Mehra, director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, a network based here, told IPS.

“Business has a responsibility to respect human rights, but this is more than just compliance with domestic laws. Instead, business must ensure that they, throughout their business relationships and including within their supply chains, avoid negatively impacting human rights and engage in appropriate judicial remediation when violations do occur.”

ICCR is now urging 15 U.S.-based corporations in particular to take a series of steps in this regard. These include agribusiness giants (ADM and ConAgra), retailers (Costco, Kroger, Target and Walmart), airlines (Delta, US Airways and Southwest), hotel chains (Hyatt, Starwood, Choice) and others.

The group’s members recently released a new set of principles and recommendations that would lead companies to make specific declarations to ensure that the entities within their supply chain will comply with a host of international agreements aimed at cracking down on various forms of human trafficking, including the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, passed in 2011.

Companies are also urged to publish regular updates on steps taken in this direction, as well as analysis of their impact.

“These are not aspirational recommendations – they’re very practical and very much based on ongoing and emerging practice,” Lauren Compere, an ICCR board member and managing director at Boston Common Asset Management, a social investment firm, told IPS.

“We started to really engage on how to implement the Guiding Principles, taking our practical experience over the past 15 years of engaging on child labour, human trafficking, modern-day slavery. These principles offer a roadmap for companies to take to engage on this.”

ICCR has a standing relationship with each of the 15 companies, which Compere and others feel could be particularly amenable to talking about additional steps to safeguard their supply chains.

“Where companies generally still miss the grade is on disclosure, especially within the hospitality sector. Disclosure on mitigating risks around trafficking really needs a lot more systematic, standardised reporting,” she says.

“For the moment, most of the information that is available is anecdotal, without data even on the percentage of operations that are covered. Some companies are getting better on general human rights disclosure, but we’re not seeing that yet on human trafficking.”

On dealing with grievances or the mitigation of risks, she says, in many companies there is still no real understanding of the full impact that corporate policies are having.

20-30 million

Estimates on the size of the global human trafficking problem are notoriously difficult. According to the International Labour Organisation, around 14.2 million people were thought to have been engaged in some form of forced labour in 2012, while another 4.5 million had been coerced into sex work.

Others say these numbers are likely far higher, with global numbers perhaps topping 30 million.

ICCR became involved in the intersection of corporate responsibility and trafficking in 2006, when a group of Scandinavian investors began pressuring the Marriott hotel chain over reports of child prostitution rings making use of the some of the company’s facilities in Costa Rica. Within a year, Marriott had rolled out a new, pointed policy on the issue, and has since engaged in annual shareholder disclosure.

While Marriott was never accused of knowingly facilitating these exchanges, the lack of stated policy was seen as detrimental to broader anti-trafficking efforts.

“Hotels, motels and others in the entertainment sector are all vulnerable to sex trafficking, and we’ve seen that if these types of businesses open their eyes they may find trafficking taking place within their operations,” Karen Stauss, director of programmes at Free the Slaves, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“While agriculture is a bit different, all across the world this is a sector where workers are very ill-paid, often coming from rural areas where they may not have a strong education, including on their rights. Without a doubt there is no way that we’ll solve the human trafficking problem until multinational corporations get involved – they have huge buying power and thus can access much farther down the supply chains.”

Pressure from consumers, advocacy groups and national and international regulation has had an increasing impact in recent years, with more and more companies recognising that actions taken throughout their supply chains can be a damaging liability. Further, Stauss notes that the use of, for instance, forced labour typically offers profits only far down the supply chain, with little to no positive effect for parent companies.

“Unfortunately, we still constantly see companies using the language of ‘impossibility’, claiming that their supply chains are so long that it is impossible to tackle these problems,” she says.

“The way I see it, this is just a lack of vision and creativity. The information and communications technology industry, for instance, has been pushed to take this on [due to U.S. legislation] and we’re now seeing that sector doing things that five years ago they said were impossible.”

Yet while recent federal legislation here is starting to have an impact on certain industries – such as the electronics sector – at risk of using so-called conflict minerals, there is currently no broader U.S. law requiring corporations to take steps to ensure that their supply chains are free of human trafficking.

Important precedent in this regard has come from California, however, which in 2010 passed landmark legislation requiring such regular disclosure for certain large companies (related information is available here).

While efforts to adopt a similar law at the federal level failed during the last congressional session, Stauss says supporters are expecting a new such bill to be introduced in coming weeks – and notes that the coalition of lawmakers and stakeholders in favour of such a law has continued to grow.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) farmworkers at a rally in Lakeland, Florida on Apr. 18, 2010. The Working Group voiced particular concerns regarding low-wage agricultural workers. Credit: Andrew Stelzer/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 4 2013 (IPS)

A United Nations expert group is warning that too many gaps remain in implementing new safeguards among businesses based in the United States, both in terms of their domestic and international operations, to ensure the protection of human rights of workers and communities affected by those operations.

Two members of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights wrapped up a 10-day fact-finding mission to the United States this week, at the end of which they released initial observations. Ultimately, these will be expanded upon and finalised for presentation to the U.N. Human Rights Council in June 2014.“It’s a sad thought that our politicians are so crooked that we have to ask the United Nations for help, but no one else will listen.” -- Junior Walk of Coal River Mountain Watch

“With a few exceptions, most companies still struggle to understand the implications of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights,” Puvan Selvanathan, the current head of the Working Group and one of the two members on the U.S. trip, said at the end of the mission “Those that do have policies in place, in turn, face the challenge of turning such policies into effective practices.”

Selvanathan and his colleague, Michael Addo, focused on gauging U.S. adherence to and regulatory changes following the 2011 adoption of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These principles offer the first international standards aimed at ameliorating the negative rights impacts of global business.

Although the United States is a signatory to the Guiding Principles, Washington has not yet come up with a national plan for their implantation, a gap highlighted by the Working Group and long emphasised by civil society.

“We were pleased that the Working Group engaged with civil society organisations, including human rights, environmental, labour and indigenous groups,” Amol Mehra, director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), a Washington-based coalition, told IPS.

“We believe that the U.S. government has much farther to go in fulfilling its duty to protect human rights under the Guiding Principles … and we also note the Working Group’s call to the U.S. government to develop a National Action Plan for implementation of the Guiding Principles.”

Both Mehra and the Working Group also noted the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Shell. That case, decided just weeks ago, will now “significantly limit access to judicial remedy for victims of corporate-related human rights abuse,” Mehra said.

The Working Group, meanwhile, noted that further analysis was still necessary to understand the “full implications” of the judgement.

Due diligence

In late April, ICAR and a group of civil society groups sent a brief to the U.S. State Department outlining a series of recommendations to bring the country closer in line with the Guiding Principles and to strengthen related indicators.

The brief’s three central recommendations, in addition to developing a national implementation plan, include strengthening remedies for human rights violations. It also calls on regulators to mandate that U.S. corporations incorporate human rights into their “due diligence”, the legally mandated inquiries that companies must take ahead of a business sale or agreement.

Currently, such a step regarding human rights impact is not required.

“Our overall concern is that quite a bit more needs to be done on this issue in the United States, and we’re looking for regulatory mechanisms that can hold businesses to account on human rights,” Corinna Gilfillan, head of the U.S. office of Global Witness, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“In particular, we’re asking that the U.S. government mandates human rights due diligence, looks into how laws can be structured around this issue. And, of course, we’re also asking that U.S. government institutions themselves act in accordance with human rights norms.”

The early notes from the Working Group do offer positive reports on local-level engagement in line with the Guiding Principles, as well as on important strengthening of U.S. policy and regulation, including bolstering disclosure standards. Movement towards broad implementation, however, appears to be taking place only slowly.

“The U.S. government has committed to the Guiding Principles, and established a number of key initiatives in this regard,” the Working Group’s Michael Addo stated Wednesday, when he and Selvanathan unveiled their early observations here in Washington.

“[But] it is now facing the challenge of putting them into practice, across all departments, ensuring that this is done in a coherent and effective way, and in a way that makes a real difference to people on the ground.”

Selvanathan and Addo pointed to “significant gaps” in oversight, regulation and enforcement in the context of U.S. attempts to conform to the Guiding Principles. Yet they said the responsibility goes beyond government officials.

“There is negligible awareness of the Guiding Principles generally among U.S. stakeholders,” they note in an eight-page concluding statement seen by IPS, “and, it seems, little appreciation of human rights being material to the conduct of business in the U.S.”

Chronic disregard

Speaking with reporters and civil society on Wednesday, the Working Group voiced particular concerns regarding low-wage agricultural workers, lack of free and prior informed consent for Native American communities engaging with big business, and harmful practices by the domestic extractives industry.

Indeed, Selvanathan and Addo reserved some of their strongest language for these issues. For instance, they reported having heard “allegations of labour practices in low-wage industries with migrant workers, particularly within the services sector, that would be illegal under both U.S. laws and international standards.”

Such violations reportedly include violations of minimum wage requirements, wage theft and “chronic disregard for minimum health and safety measures”.

The two also singled out the extractives industry, travelling to the state of West Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains, to talk to communities living near strip mines and so-called “mountaintop removal” mining operations.

There, they were told of “significant adverse human rights impacts, most notably related to the enjoyment of the rights to health and water”, and also heard allegations of intimidation and harassment by those opposed to surface mining.

“I am hopeful that our visit from the United Nations is a sign that they’re starting to take notice of the human rights atrocities being committed in Appalachia today,” Junior Walk, a campaigner with Coal River Mountain Watch, a local advocacy group, said in a statement.

“It’s a sad thought that our politicians are so crooked that we have to ask the United Nations for help, but no one else will listen.”