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GENEVA – December 3, 2013
With an overflowing full house with more than 2,000 participants, many watching live on internet around the world, the UN’s Global Forum on Business and Human Rights launched today in Geneva Switzerland.
The meeting is yet another step in the more than a decade of evolution towards a governance due diligence framework for corporations to abide by international human rights law. Born in the 1990s due to labor abuses, environmental degradation, security force violence and many other abuses perpetrated by many transnational corporations, States and civil society organizations began calling for binding legislation to govern corporate behavior.
The forum, which will go on for 2 days, will address labor law violations, indigenous rights, environmental degradation, consultation, discrimination, among other issues that raise concern in corporate investments by large multinational corporations around the world. The role of the State in regulating, monitoring and controling such practice is central to the debate, as is talk about introducing a binding international treaty to make human rights due diligence compliance framework for corporate actors.
The recently adopted three pillar framework which includes the State Duty to Protect, the Corporate Responsibility to Respect, and the need for Effective Remedy is at the heart of discussions for the forum.
Jose Luis Balmaceda, Ambassador to the UN emphasized the importance that States develop Action Plans to promote human rights in the corporate sector, and underlined the importance that politicians must lead this initiative at all levels.
Jorge Daniel Taillant, Director of the Argentine organization, the Center for Human Rights and Environment (CEDHA), has followed and contributed to the evolution of this agenda since the 1990s, in Geneva for the forum, said, “We all know what we need to do, but governments are lagging, they’re not introducing national laws, nor are they pushing companies to address human rights, and of course, corporations are not running to do their own due diligence if noone is pushing them to move forward. An international treaty on human rights and business may be the only way to lock in corporate obligations and really move the sector to compliance”.
CEDHA is the Argentine local partner of the Danish Institute of Human Right’s new webportal promoting human rights and business due diligence. See: http://hrbcountryguide.org/countries/argentina/
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