John Ruggie’s draft final business and human rights paper establishes clear guidelines for the role of business, says Peter Davis
John Ruggie’s draft final business and human rights paper establishes clear guidelines for the role of business, says Peter DavisIn the past few weeks, Professor John Ruggie has been touring the world presenting the draft of his final paper for the UN in his role as special representative on business and human rights. This report is the culmination of six years’ work, and in particular the strenuous efforts by him and his team since the extension of his mandate in 2008.
His Protect, Respect and Remedy framework proposed in 2008 set out a clear structure of responsibility for human rights in the corporate context. It restated the primacy of the requirement of states to protect human rights, the corporate imperative to respect them and the need for remedy for abuses that nonetheless occur.
His new paper – Guiding Principles for the Implementation of the UN Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework – develops ideas about how the 2008 framework might be implemented. As Ruggie put it in his Chandler Lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in London in January: “The framework addresses the ‘what’ question – what do states and businesses need to do to ensure business respect for human rights? The guiding principles address the ‘how’.”
The new report takes the Protect, Respect and Remedy framework and provides principles by which each of the components of the framework might work in practice. There are 29 draft principles in all, each with commentary elaborating its meaning.
Take his first principle: “States must protect against business-related human rights abuse within their territory and/or jurisdiction.” The commentary makes it clear that this is a matter of international law: that states have a legal duty to protect human rights.
The result is effectively a handbook for the implementation of a comprehensive system for the management of business and human rights, with clear guidance for states and corporations.
The third component – processes for remediation – also stresses the importance of having both judicial and non-judicial processes for providing restitution for human rights abuses allegedly committed by companies.
However, while the structure is comprehensive, it is not hard to spot the challenge to what Ruggie proposes. Although only restating the facts of international law, his focus on the primacy of state responsibility to protect human rights raises the question of what is meant to happen about states that do not do this. There may be a legal requirement on them to do so, but some do not. In such countries, the onus on the corporate sector to play its role will be considerable.
Managing responsibilities
More importantly from the perspective of those working with the corporate sector are Ruggie’s recommendations to companies about how to manage the responsibility to protect human rights, a central but difficult area.
Ruggie’s recommendations that companies should have proper policies in relation to human rights and that these should be “embedded throughout the enterprise”, and his focus on due diligence as a process to identify potential issues are perfectly sensible.
Getting companies – even those willing – to comply will be hard and take time. While it is by no means an insurmountable challenge, integrating these issues into core business practice is far from straightforward. In his Chandler lecture Ruggie said he was “under no illusion” that many challenges remain.
The guiding principles still have to run the gauntlet of potential corporate and NGO hostility, the latter already manifested in a submission from Amnesty International that deals solely with legal aspects but could threaten the whole. Amnesty’s earlier efforts to deflect the mandate to research into corporate abuse were unsuccessful, but the dominance of lawyers in the NGO camp means that there is little understanding of the challenge presented by a competitive market economy driven primarily by financial criteria and the relative impotence of the law.
However, whatever work remains to be done, what Ruggie’s mandate has achieved should not be underestimated. As he points out, before his appointment, our knowledge on business and human rights was limited: his mandate has developed “enough research reports … to fill a small library”.
Even more importantly, his work has provided a structure for the debate and action on business and human rights to be built on. Getting businesses, NGOs and government agencies on the same page is no mean achievement. The report to be presented in June may only be, as Ruggie says, “the end of the beginning on business and human rights”, but at least it provides a common route-map for everyone to use.
Dr Peter Davis is Ethical Corporation’s politics editor.