Business & Human Rights
Business & Human Rights: A Path to Ethical and Sustainable Growth
In today’s interconnected world, businesses play a crucial role in shaping societies and economies. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Business & Human Rights is a framework that ensures economic activities respect fundamental human rights, promoting ethical, sustainable, and inclusive growth.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Adopted by the United Nations in 2011, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) provide a global standard for preventing and addressing human rights abuses linked to business operations. The framework is based on three pillars:
- The State Duty to Protect Human Rights – Governments must create laws and policies that safeguard human rights in business practices.
- The Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights – Businesses must avoid causing or contributing to human rights abuses and address any negative impacts.
- Access to Remedy – Individuals affected by corporate actions should have access to justice and effective grievance mechanisms.
Key Issues in Business & Human Rights
- Labor Rights & Fair Wages – Ensuring safe working conditions, fair pay, and the right to unionize.
- Environmental Responsibility – Preventing pollution, deforestation, and climate damage caused by industries.
- Supply Chain Transparency – Eliminating child labor, forced labor, and unethical sourcing of materials.
- Diversity & Inclusion – Promoting equal opportunities regardless of gender, race, or background.
- Consumer Rights – Ensuring products and services meet ethical and safety standards.
The Role of Creative Industries
For the creative industries, integrating business and human rights means producing ethically sourced goods, ensuring fair wages for artists and workers, and promoting cultural diversity. Fashion brands, design studios, and digital media companies are increasingly adopting sustainable, fair-trade, and socially responsible business models to align with these principles.
By embracing human rights as a core value, businesses can build trust, strengthen their brand reputation, and contribute to a more just and equitable global economy. The future of business is not just about profit—it’s about people, planet, and progress.
Directory Business & Human Rights Organizations
Shopping for Human Rights!
“If we know more about the products we buy, we can make informed decisions about where we buy them from.”
In a world where the 50 of the 100 biggest economies are multinational companies and new communications technology is erasing national borders, governments are no longer the sole agents of global behavior.
Corporations have reached a level of influence that makes them both a problem and a potential solution in human rights struggles and requires a dual effort: holding them accountable for their actions (and the actions of their suppliers) while also providing a path so that their actions can support a positive human rights agenda.
Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
The process of globalization and other global developments over the past decades have seen non-state actors such as transnational corporations and other business play an increasingly important role both internationally, but also at the national and local levels. The growing reach and impact of business enterprises have given rise to a debate about the roles and responsibilities of such actors with regard to human rights.
International human rights standards have traditionally been the responsibility of governments, aimed at regulating relations between the State and individuals and groups. But with the increased role of corporate actors, nationally and internationally, the issue of business’ impact on the enjoyment of human rights has been placed on the agenda of the United Nations. Over the past decade, the United Nations human rights machinery has been considering the scope of business’ human rights responsibilities and exploring ways for corporate actors to be accountable for the impact of their activities on human rights. As a result of this process, there is now greater clarity about the respective roles and responsibilities of governments and business with regard to protection and respect for human rights. Most prominently, the emerging understanding and consensus have come as a result of the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework on human rights and business, which was elaborated by the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, building on major research and extensive consultations with all relevant stakeholders, including States, civil society and the business community.
On 16 June 2011, the UN Human Rights Council endorsed Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights for implementing the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework, providing – for the first time – a global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity. In a nutshell, the framework rests on three pillars, as laid out in the introduction to the Guiding Principles:
“The first is the State duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business enterprises, through appropriate policies, regulation, and adjudication. The second is the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, which means that business enterprises should act with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others and to address adverse impacts with which they are involved. The third is the need for greater access by victims to effective remedy, both judicial and non-judicial.”
How to Incorporate Human Rights Obligations in Bilateral Investment Treaties?
Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are, at least in their present form, asymmetrical. Foreign investors are being accorded substantive rights under these treaties without being subject to any specific obligations. In this context, one question that has been increasingly debated in academia and in civil society is whether there is a need for a greater degree of balance in BITs between the legitimate interests of investors and host countries. This question is part of a boarder debate on how human rights violations committed by corporations doing business abroad can best be addressed. Some international instruments, such as international human rights treaties, are specifically directed at the activities of corporations. However, the obligations contained in these instruments are binding on the contracting states and not on corporations themselves. International law (as it now stands) does not impose any direct legal obligations on corporations. However, nothing in international law prevents countries from signing treaties (such as BITs) that would impose human rights obligations upon corporations.
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