Ask the CEO of a multinational corporation “does your company respect and protect human rights?” and the answer is unlikely to be negative. But go on to ask another question “how do you know?” and you’ll probably get a much less confident response. The truth is that, until very recently, they didn't have to know. What’s more, if a problem or an accusation was filed against them, there was no international legal framework against which they could be brought to justice - existing national frameworks were inadequate or simply not relevant.
This was the challenge given to John Ruggie, Berthold Beitz Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government and an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, by the United Nations Human Rights Council –
to bridge the gap between national public governance frameworks and the governance of global businesses.
Last night, I went to a talk by
John Ruggie at the
Harvard Bookstore, to mark the launch of his book
Just Business. He talked about his approach to the challenge and his experiences of working with governments and corporations all over the world to agree a set of
guiding principles, perhaps better known as Ruggie’s Rules. It became clear to him very early on that there was no silver bullet - it wasn't about creating a legal instrument and expecting everyone to adhere to it because, as we saw with the Kyoto Protocol, this would be far too easy to ignore. What was required was a ‘building block approach’, establishing a common platform (i.e. the guiding principles) and then gradually bringing organisations on-board. For example, having agreed the guiding principles, John Ruggie and his team approached national export agencies and persuaded them that, when promoting companies overseas, there should be some due diligence built into the process to ensure that they are not promoting companies who do not respect or protect human rights. This has proved to be a clever and successful means of pushing the guiding principles out into the global corporate network and a start towards changing the status quo.
As you’d expect, the guidelines have received mixed reactions. Activist organisations don’t think they go far enough with the organization Human Rights Watch saying that the UN Human Rights Council
“squandered an opportunity to take meaningful action to curtail business-related human rights abuses.” Other commentators, such as John Braithwaite, Corporate Criminologist at the Australian National University, are more encouraged by the steps taken:
“I’m a strong supporter of progressive UN framework agreements that seem pretty wishy-washy at first…“ in the long run they can make a huge contribution from limited beginnings.”
Whilst, I don’t believe that extensive regulation is the answer to making companies more sustainable, it is helpful to have some frameworks in place to ensure a minimum standard of practice. As John Ruggie put it last night “it’s the end of the beginning”; in other words, Ruggie’s Rules are not going to eliminate abuses of human rights by global companies over-night but they create a baseline to support companies to start answering the question “how do you know?” with confidence.
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