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Submission to the UN consultation on human rights due diligence
Last May, ECCJ submitted a response to the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights on the topic “corporate human rights due diligence–identifying and leveraging emerging practice”.
The call’s concept note stressed that scaling up in the implementation of due diligence “will also require push and pull efforts by a wider range of actors: notably States”. In particular, ECCJ’s contribution addressed two key questions:
- To what extent would it be useful to examine the role of regulation and government policy in relation to human rights due diligence?
- What concrete examples of government regulation, policy and initiatives might be useful to highlight?
In order to respond to the questions above, the document provides a number of relevant examples of adopted legislation or legislative initiatives that embed HRDD or some of its elements into legal frameworks at country and EU levels.
Moreover, the document draws attention to the growing presence, within law-making processes and policy discussions, of the link between due diligence requirements and corporate liability. This development presents important implications to address some of the key obstacles faced by victims of business-related human rights abuses when they seek remedy.
In addition to regulatory developments, this contribution collects policy statements by governments, European institutions and United Nations bodies which acknowledged the need for binding regulations to promote human rights due diligence implementation, or commit to undertake or assess policy reforms in this regard.
The Working Group has been mandated by the Human Rights Council to provide worldwide dissemination and implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The WG has decided to focus its 2018 report to the UN General Assembly on emerging practice and innovations of corporate human rights due diligence across sectors.
This call for contributions if part of the consultation work that the WG has undertaken in order to inform its report to the UN General Assembly.
