After looking at over two hundred company human rights statements, it's quite amazing how so few commit to respecting ALL human rights. Not to mention the vague language and lack of reference to the ICCPR/ICESCR.  As a consolation, there are many companies out there that may not use the right languge or tick off all of the critiera, but have been very thoughtful about the issues and just need a little guidance and structure. That is far more heartening than a company policy that hits all the right notes but is lacking the thoughtfulness, conscientousness and sense of responsibility/ownership that a good human rights policy should convey.  

Firstly, I welcome all the efforts of Professor Ruggie and his team with assisting in the difficult process of attempting to clarify the content and parameters for the debate around corporate accountability for human rights.

Two things trouble me about this aspect of the Framework.  Firstly, while I agree the full range of human rights should be considered by companies, the Framework does not elaborate how companies are meant to know how these rights relate specifically to them. Merely requiring companies to "look to" the UDHR and other leading human rights documents is not especially useful. What is more important is how should they engage these standards.

I suspect that companies may find it more useful if Team Ruggie would undertake a full elaboration of how these rights correspond to their specific duties as companies. The kind of elaboration required has already begun in projects underway to concretely define the elements of various corporate human rights obligations, included in the questions of the more respected human rights impact assessment tools.  These tools are available from organisations such as Rights & Democracy, the Danish Institute for Human Rights and Maplecroft.  Questions within these tools provide an opportunity to companies to self-assess whether they operate in accordance with international law by asking practical questions such as whether the company employs persons below a certain age (with advice attached to notify the company of the legal minimum age in their operating region), or whether any evictees are provided land of equivalent or greater value and similar distance to employment and services.  Made widely available, these tools could be transformative for the way companies might begin to understand their day-to-day obligations, how law in this area may finally become operationalised and how victims of corporate abuse can begin to ask courts to hear their cases in relation to these defacto guidelines for corporate behaviour. Knowing tools like this are available, which more precisely outline what the practical requirements are for operating in accordance with a given right, the challenge then becomes that much less abstract and more about ensuring a baseline across jurisdictional adaptations and tailoring, the accuracy of legal interpretation, independent oversight of compliance and potential justiciability. 

I do not mean to agrue for a greater use of human rights impact assessment tools in the way they are currently used - although that may well be beneficial in relation to other considerations. What I am suggesting here is that perhaps it may be beneficial for us all to use the operationalisation of rights that been done to make these tools to begin to define the baseline obligations for a company at field level.  One potentially useful guiding template for how to develop a consensus around standards like this make come from the existing work of The Sphere Project in the area of operationalising aspects of humanitarian law for engineers and other non-humanitarian law professionals working 'in the field'.  The operationalising of rights in this way would likely have teething problems when developed on such a scale, but by engaging and developing them, and forming consensus around such standards in such a format, we could perhaps finally take very significant steps to bring corporate accountability to life at the community level.

It is my feeling that only when there is clear elaboration of exactly how international humanitarian and human rights law interacts with the day-to-day activities of businesses will this Framework's foundation be strong enough and useful enough to gain real practical significance.

Secondly, I agree that some rights will be more appropriate for a corporation to consider than others, dependent on the specifics of their circumstances.  However, stating that companies should be looking at themselves to tailor the content of their responsibility from an array of international rights, seems far too weak a standard to spur any great positive alteration in corporate behaviour.  What checks would be in place to ensure that the self-tailored content of the responsibility sufficiently matches the human rights risks that are present? The requisite flexibility that has been built into this Framework, given the full ambit of circumstances it is attempting to cover, unfortunately allows for the very people that are set to break the law to choose which laws to include into the content of their responsibility as they see it. 

Perhaps the only way to navigate around this flaw is to revise the Framework such that is reflects the obvious need for greater emphasis to be on States, not companies, to define the specific content of the corporate responsiblity to respect, and the penalties for violating it, in their jursidictions.  This would be in addition to, or even as part of, their State duty to Protect and provide Remedy.  Finally, I firmly believe that an International Convention on Corporate Accountability that sets the parameters for States, with regard to universally agreed minimum elements to be included into all jurisdictional interpretations of the corporate responsiblity to protect, would be a very positive step.  Corporations could then work from these jurisdictional benchmarks to devise their own implementation plans in line with these minimum parameters. 

At first glance it may appear that such a Convention would merely be duplicating the present process of States forming laws to manage issues as they perceive them.  However, the action of a Corporate Accountability Convention, as I see it, would be to set out the minimum elements that must be included into a national law of each signatory, which details what the corporate responsibility to protect means for that jurisdiction.  Such 'minimum elements' may include abidance by interpretations of corporate codes of conduct concerning fundamental human rights (i.e. genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes), as defined by the operationalisation of human rights into corporate standards - whose forerunners are presently contained in existing human rights impact assessment tools.

Thanks, Dom.

I agree that there is a need for a clear elaboration of how international humanitarian law and human rights law interact with the day-to-day activities of businesses.  While I don’t think that the reports to the Human Rights Council are the best place to do this, it is indeed useful for these reports to point to tools that demonstrate how corporate actions can correspond to human rights violations.

In this regard, I’d like to highlight para 57 of the 2009 Ruggie Report which states the following:

 “Demystifying human rights: One issue concerns the conceptual difficulties that even companies committed to internalizing human rights have faced in mastering this subject. Part of the problem is that international human rights instruments were written by States, for States. Their meaning for businesses has not always been understood clearly by human rights experts, let alone the engineers, security managers, and supply chain officers in companies who have to deal with the corporate responsibility to respect on the ground. But considerable advances have been made recently. In particular, an OHCHR publication, “Human Rights Translated”, does what the title promises, by translating State-based text into language and examples that make sense in a business context. Similarly, the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights has developed a matrix mapping elements of the International Bill of Human Rights onto various business functions, making it more accessible to company staff.”

Here, the Ruggie team has listed two specific tools, the OHCHR and the BLIHR matrix.  A couple of questions to the broader group -  Would it be useful to include a longer list of existing tools which assist companies in demystifying human rights?  If so, which tools have you found the most helpful when explaining human rights to company staff that do not work on such issues regularly?