United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on business & human rights
These “Foundation” pages explain the corporate responsibility to respect human rights so participants have the necessary background to engage constructively in the sections that follow. This section does not have discussion questions like the other sections do, but readers are welcome to add comments and reactions.
Updated 5 April 2010
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, through appropriate policies, regulation, and adjudication; the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, which means to act with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others; and greater access by victims to effective remedy, judicial and non-judicial.
This online consultation is focused on the second pillar, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. But the pillars are not meant to exist in isolation from one another.
The framework is intended to reflect and promote the ongoing, dynamic interaction between business, governments, civil society, and other actors, and contribute to collective and cumulative progress.
Progress within any one pillar will trigger and reinforce progress in the others. States and business have independent obligations, thus neither needs to, nor should, wait for the other to move first. As States do a better job of fulfilling their duty to protect, that will facilitate and begin to ensure that all companies meet their responsibility to respect. As companies internalize the responsibility to respect, they will increasingly support State efforts to bring laggards along. As access to remedy improves, companies and States alike will learn how better to prevent corporate-related abuses in the first place. And so on.
The SRSG welcomes general comments here on the links and synergies between the three pillars of the U.N. "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework.
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Let's start this discussion! An evident link between the second and third pillar is that non-judicial remedies/accessible greivance mechanisms provided by companies are a key component of any monitoring and tracking of human rights impact which a company undertakes.
Further, a possible link between the first and second pillar, based on evidence gathered in our work with the UK government and businesses, is that companies want to be told what the human rights issues are they should be diligent of. Is this a role for government? Certainly here that is the expectation, though another place to look would be back towards the third pillar, and the national human rights institution.
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Seeing as how @LukeWilde and @nnweston both raised questions about National Human Rights Institutions (NHRI's), I wanted to provide some concrete examples of NHRI's around the world. We current have 39 NHRI's profiled on BASESwiki:
http://baseswiki.org/en/Category:National_Human_Rights_Institutions
In terms of evaluating the effectiveness of a given national human rights institution, some of the questions that we should be asking:
Hope this helps a little!