Responsibility to Protect
In mid-March the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley hosted an event called Stopping Mass Atrocities, a conference that gathered scholars and activists to discuss “R2P” – the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Basically, R2P demands that international agencies and governments intervene to stop genocide before it happens, instead of watching feebly and waiting until it’s too late to act.
The movement to advance the R2P doctrine has been gathering force and winning widespread support around the world. In time, it may prevent the kinds of atrocities that spun out of control places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.
At the same time, in a less conspicuous corner of the human rights agenda, there's more chagrin than hope. The international effort to protect workers and ecosystems in the developing world from the unregulated excesses of multinational corporations is floundering.
John Ruggie, the Harvard professor and UN adviser charged with finding solutions to global corporate abuse, released a long awaited report on the issue Thursday, but admittedly found few answers.
The report he submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, after two years of study, was evocatively titled “Business and Human Rights: Mapping International Standards of Responsibility and Accountability for Corporate Acts.” Not surprisingly, it found “little movement” toward regulating corporate responsibility in the context of international human rights law, which left a “sizeable protection gap for victims.”
The bottom line here is not the failure of corporations to regulate themselves under international principles of human rights. It’s the fact that governments in the developing world invite unregulated business activity from abroad, and make it a point to create a favorable environment of lax enforcement of their own labor, health and environmental laws. This goes under the banner of Sweatshops are Good for Development.
Could an equivalent to the R2P doctrine of intervention be used to break the cycle of exploitation and abuse that thrives when local laws and regulations are flouted in a tacit agreement between banana republics and global business?
Ruggie, who serves as “Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporationsand other business enterprises,” tried to attack the problem within the framework of the “state duty to protect” doctrine that is embedded in the core of UN human rights treaties. A government's responsibility to protect its citizens from famine, civil violence and even genocide also applies in theory to business practices.
It’s a laudable principle, but it gets bogged down in the reality of political expediency. Even if they had the means to enforce business regulations, many of these governments don’t want to have what they see as unreasonably strict labor or environmental standards of the developed world shoved down their throats.
The multinational corporations are left to enjoy a wide degree of latitude in this gray area of enforcement to focus on what they are chartered to do, make money. In China, they've gone a step further, protesting the Central Goverment's plans to reform its loosely enforced labor laws -- with the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai leading the charge.
A lot of fuss has been made about the rise in corporate codes of conduct to mitigate labor and environmental abuses, but there is still no cohesive system in place to monitor compliance to those codes. Brand protection, not transparency, is the driving force for business in this debate. Self regulation is not the answer.
Are international agencies and foreign governments poised to intervene in the domestic business practices of sovereign nations? Ruggie’s report notes that the “treaty-based human rights machinery” has been paying increased attention to the way governments fulfill their duties to regulate corporate activity. But I ca
n't imagine the International Labor Organization gaining the authority to send inspectors into Burmese textile factories to cite infractions and propose sanctions. The IAEA isn't getting much respect for monitoring nuclear weapons production these days -- why would anyone want to bother with the ILO? Or pay heed to the UN's laudible proposeal for a "Global Compact" for Business and Human Rights.
The Ruggie report concludes that “the permissive conditions for business-related human rights abuses today are created by a misalignment between economic forces and governance capacity," according to a UN statement. "It also notes that it is the most vulnerable people and communities pay the heaviest price for these governance gaps.”
In other words, the tsunami of economic globalization is swamping the developed world, and there’s no one out there to enforce regulations or to be held accountable for the damage. Maybe it’s already too late to intervene. We'll be left to clean up the mess after the fact for the global dispossessed.
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The movement to advance the R2P doctrine has been gathering force and winning widespread support around the world. In time, it may prevent the kinds of atrocities that spun out of control places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.
At the same time, in a less conspicuous corner of the human rights agenda, there's more chagrin than hope. The international effort to protect workers and ecosystems in the developing world from the unregulated excesses of multinational corporations is floundering.
John Ruggie, the Harvard professor and UN adviser charged with finding solutions to global corporate abuse, released a long awaited report on the issue Thursday, but admittedly found few answers.
The report he submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, after two years of study, was evocatively titled “Business and Human Rights: Mapping International Standards of Responsibility and Accountability for Corporate Acts.” Not surprisingly, it found “little movement” toward regulating corporate responsibility in the context of international human rights law, which left a “sizeable protection gap for victims.”
The bottom line here is not the failure of corporations to regulate themselves under international principles of human rights. It’s the fact that governments in the developing world invite unregulated business activity from abroad, and make it a point to create a favorable environment of lax enforcement of their own labor, health and environmental laws. This goes under the banner of Sweatshops are Good for Development.
Could an equivalent to the R2P doctrine of intervention be used to break the cycle of exploitation and abuse that thrives when local laws and regulations are flouted in a tacit agreement between banana republics and global business?
Ruggie, who serves as “Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporationsand other business enterprises,” tried to attack the problem within the framework of the “state duty to protect” doctrine that is embedded in the core of UN human rights treaties. A government's responsibility to protect its citizens from famine, civil violence and even genocide also applies in theory to business practices.
It’s a laudable principle, but it gets bogged down in the reality of political expediency. Even if they had the means to enforce business regulations, many of these governments don’t want to have what they see as unreasonably strict labor or environmental standards of the developed world shoved down their throats.
The multinational corporations are left to enjoy a wide degree of latitude in this gray area of enforcement to focus on what they are chartered to do, make money. In China, they've gone a step further, protesting the Central Goverment's plans to reform its loosely enforced labor laws -- with the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai leading the charge.
A lot of fuss has been made about the rise in corporate codes of conduct to mitigate labor and environmental abuses, but there is still no cohesive system in place to monitor compliance to those codes. Brand protection, not transparency, is the driving force for business in this debate. Self regulation is not the answer.
Are international agencies and foreign governments poised to intervene in the domestic business practices of sovereign nations? Ruggie’s report notes that the “treaty-based human rights machinery” has been paying increased attention to the way governments fulfill their duties to regulate corporate activity. But I ca
n't imagine the International Labor Organization gaining the authority to send inspectors into Burmese textile factories to cite infractions and propose sanctions. The IAEA isn't getting much respect for monitoring nuclear weapons production these days -- why would anyone want to bother with the ILO? Or pay heed to the UN's laudible proposeal for a "Global Compact" for Business and Human Rights.The Ruggie report concludes that “the permissive conditions for business-related human rights abuses today are created by a misalignment between economic forces and governance capacity," according to a UN statement. "It also notes that it is the most vulnerable people and communities pay the heaviest price for these governance gaps.”
In other words, the tsunami of economic globalization is swamping the developed world, and there’s no one out there to enforce regulations or to be held accountable for the damage. Maybe it’s already too late to intervene. We'll be left to clean up the mess after the fact for the global dispossessed.
#
posted by Karl at 11:18 PM
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