Today, the UN Annual Forum on Business and Human
Rights
kicked off — with high-level business commitments to prevent human rights
violations in their operations, to prepare for next year’s ten-year anniversary
of the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human Rights
and to realise the ambition to "build back better."
The opening of the Forum gave a sobering assessment of how the COVID
crisis has reversed business and human rights gains.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that COVID
restrictions were being exploited to suppress rights and to silence dissent. She
pointed out that supply chains had suffered most, with female workers
disproportionately affected.
UNICEF’s Sanjay Wijesekerg said decades of progress on child labour and
child marriage were being lost. He was one of a number of speakers throughout
the day calling on governments to use their financial leverage during the crisis
to enforce respect for business and human rights.
“Vast bail-outs from governments, which are welcome — to support business and
retain jobs — should now include conditionalities on companies for time-bound
action plans to introduce environmental and human rights due
diligence,” Business and Human Rights Resource Centre Director Phil
Bloomer told the Forum.
In a special session on lessons from the pandemic, Tony Khaw — Director of
Corporate Social Responsibility for semi-conductor producer NXP — explained
how they had been able to help foreign migrant workers, always the most
vulnerable in the company’s workforce across 26 countries, who were unable to
return home because of travel restrictions; and Shubha Sekhar, Director of
Human Rights: Eurasia & North Africa for The Coca-Cola Company, described
how human rights specialists had been embedded in the company’s
crisis-management teams.
Both companies found the advantage that comes from the fact that “due diligence”
meant they had already established highly developed relations with suppliers,
which had enormous benefits to both companies and to the supply chain when the
crisis hit. Small businesses and jobs were saved, but security of supply
remained protected.
Corey Klemmer, Director of Engagement at impact investor Domini, said
investors also saw how companies with strong human rights records had been shown
to be more resilient. The business case for human rights respect clearly exists
in bad times, as well as good.
However, a second theme running throughout the day was what UN Global
Compact Executive Director Sanda Ojiambo called a “growing
disconnect” between companies adopting human rights policies and taking action
to implement them.
The fourth Corporate Human Rights Benchmark annual
report — launched
today at the Forum — finds the most improvement this year has been in public
commitments to respect human rights by business, but that a large number of
companies had failed to record improvement during the
year;
and still, 79 of the 230 companies assessed scored zero for human rights due
diligence.
The day’s closing CEO panel put this down to an issue of leadership.
UN Working Group Chair Anita Ramasastry said the leading companies were the ones “where the CEO can speak easily about the Guiding Principles and not
just having a company human rights statement. It means employees, investors,
stakeholders and consumers really notice.”
Meanwhile, for anyone afraid that cross-industry collaboration between companies
on broader societal issues might impinge on their competitiveness, the best
answer came from Michele Thatcher, SVP and Chief Counsel at
PepsiCo, who said: “We even
found ourselves at Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta, talking human rights.”
Another key finding in the Human Rights Benchmark report was in a study of
automotive companies, which finds almost no correlation between companies who
rate well on climate action and those who do so on human rights. The two appear
to be treated entirely separately by the industry — it’s as if the term “climate
justice” had never been invented.
The case to link the two was made by former Irish President Mary Robinson,
who used the Forum to appeal to companies to work directly with human rights
defenders at the local level — “as they understand the link between the
environment, development and rights.”
A positive sign that the linkage is being better understood came from the
World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Filipo Veglio, who
explained how the organisation has now changed its membership criteria to
require a commitment to human rights, too.
What links the two major themes to emerge from the day — whether COVID or
climate — is the need for companies to take steps to assist vulnerable people in
supply chains, and to ensure their needs are taken into account in the change
processes in which business is engaged.
Richard Howitt will be providing daily updates on the UN Human Rights Forum 2020.
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Richard Howitt is a strategic adviser on Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Business and Human Rights. He is also a Board member, lecturer at Audencia Business School and host of the Frank Bold ‘Frankly Speaking’ responsible business podcast. Richard was Member of the European Parliament responsible for the EU’s first rules on corporate sustainability reporting and subsequently Chief Executive Officer of the International Integrated Reporting Council.
Published Nov 16, 2020 1pm EST / 10am PST / 6pm GMT / 7pm CET