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Embracing business and human rights
Not to mention other allegations of human rights violations by transnational business actors that is yet to be further investigated or resolved, such as forest and land fires allegedly set by oil palm plantations in Sumatra.
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Allegations of human rights violations by transnational business actors is yet to be further investigated or resolved, such as forest and land fires allegedly set by oil palm plantations in Sumatra. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
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n 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) endorsed the “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework” (UNGP) formulated by John Ruggie, an international affairs scholar who also serves as UN special representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations.
It stands on three pillars: first is a state’s duty to protect human rights through, for example, legislation; second is the corporate responsibility to respect human rights by complying to relevant regulations and assessing the impact of business activities on human rights; and third is the need to provide an effective remedy when a human rights violation occurs.
Despite being voluntary in its implementation, the UNGP is the first globally agreed instrument — resulting from an intergovernmental process — to set a standard to prevent and mitigate adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity.
Following up on the endorsement of the UNGP, the UNHRC established an Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Respect to Human Rights, the mandate of which is to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.”
This resolution came after Ecuador’s call for the international community to move “towards a legally binding framework to regulate the work of transnational corporations and to provide appropriate protection, justice and remedy to the victims of human rights abuses directly resulting from or related to the activities of some transnational corporations and other business enterprises.” The group has met twice since to discuss the fundamental elements of the instruments, such as scope of the instruments, extraterritoriality obligations and references to the access to remedy.
The ongoing negotiations on business and human rights (BHR) in the multilateral forum have triggered national discourse on how Indonesia should respond to it, both domestically and internationally. Answering such questions requires a comprehensive assessment of Indonesia’s current BHR framework.
Currently, no regulations specifically regulate the human rights aspect of business conduct.
