Human Rights
The first two principles of the UN Global Compact, which are derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are:
- Principle 1: Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights; and
- Principle 2: make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.
Human rights remains one of the most challenging areas of corporate citizenship. In part, this is because human rights have traditionally been the concern of states, and international human rights law has generally been addressed to them only. As more companies come to realize their (legal, moral and/or commercial) need to address human rights issues within their own operations and activities, they are confronted with a number of challenges. For example, there is the need to come to grips with the human rights framework and how the company’s own activities might relate to it. There is also uncertainty around how to avoid being complicit in human rights abuse and where the boundaries of companies’ human rights responsibility lie.
Nevertheless, whatever one's stance in the ongoing business and human rights debate, one thing is clear: there is a keen demand for tools and guidance to help companies with their implementation efforts. The Global Compact Office hopes to offer more clarity to this debate by highlighting the releavnce of human rights for business, demonstrating the business case for human rights, emphasizing practical solutions, and pointing to useful tools and guidance materials. Our goal is to show that advancing human rights is not just about managing risks and meeting standards and expectations, it is also about realizing new opportunities.
In June 2006, the Global Compact Board endorsed the idea of establishing a Global Compact Human Rights Working Group. Chaired by Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and President of Ireland, the goal of the working group is to help give strategic input to the Global Compact’s human rights work (click here for the working group's terms of reference). As well as helping to advance the goal of coherence, the working group helps define new areas of work that the Global Compact has a comparative advantage in advancing as well as new forms of learning and dialogue activities with a possible focus on the sectoral dimension of human rights. It is also hoped that new and effective ways can be identified to involve the Global Compact’s extensive local network infrastructure in this human rights work.
For more information about the human rights principles, including what companies can do to implement them, see the ten principles and principles 1 and 2.
Click here to download a Note on the UN Global Compact and Business and Human Rights.
For questions or to propose additional tools and resources for this page, please contact:
Ms. Ursula Wynhoven
wynhoven@un.org
+1-212-963-5705
(Last updated 8 May 2008)
