Welcome to the online forum for the Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General (SRSG) on business & human rights.  Please join us to share your experiences and views.

The purpose of this forum is to gather views from a wide range of stakeholders for the SRSG during 2010 as he operationalizes the U.N. "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework, as requested by the Human Rights Council.  (Read the press release.)

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.  This forum is focused on the corporate responsibility to respect human rights.

Anyone can read the pages and comments in this forum without registering, but we encourage you to contribute ideas and views.  To do so, please register.  To encourage constructive input, once you register and sign in, you will also have the ability to rate comments on relevance and whether you agree or disagree.

For more detail and background on the mandate, please visit the SRSG’s web portal, which is hosted by the independent Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

Discussion Topics

This forum is divided into sections, each of which contains multiple pages for discussion and comment: 

• The first section, “Foundations”, gives participants the necessary background to engage constructively in the sections that follow.  That section does not have discussion questions like the other sections do, but readers are welcome to add comments and reactions.
• "Human rights due diligence" continues the foundational discussion, leading into the core elements of human rights due diligence.
• “Elaboration” includes topics that further explain the corporate responsibility to respect human rights.
• “Implementation” includes topics that companies grapple with when working to meet their responsibility to respect human rights.
• “Issues” includes specific topics that stakeholders have highlighted to the SRSG as warranting particular attention.

Under “Issues”, there is also an Open Forum for stakeholders to post issues related to the corporate responsibility to respect human rights that are not covered elsewhere.