2018 United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights

Organized by the Working Group on business and human rights

Brief description of the session:
This session will feature a presentation by the Chairperson of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, Dante Pesce. The presentation will highlight key findings and recommendations from the Working Group's report to the UN General Assembly in October 2018.
The focus of the report is the concept of corporate human rights due diligence set out in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The presentation will highlight key features of human rights due diligence and why it matters; gaps and challenges in current business and Government practice; emerging good practices; and how key stakeholders — States and the investment community, in particular — can contribute to the scaling-up of effective human rights due diligence.

Key documents

• Working Group report on human rights due diligence to the 2018 General Assembly (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian)
• Executive summary of the Working Group report on human rights due diligence
• Companion paper I – Corporate human rights due diligence: Background note and elaborating on key aspects
• Companion paper II – Corporate human rights due diligence – Getting started, emerging practices, tools and resources
• Overview of references to human rights due diligence in existing State national action plans on business and human rights
• UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
• The Corporate Responsibility to Respect: An Interpretive Guide (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights)

Interpretation is provided in Korean

Organized by Global Compact Local Network (Brazil, China, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Korea, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom) and United Nations Global Compact

The Local Networks engaged in the coordination of this session have developed the following informal pre-read for this session, providing a snapshot of BHR initiatives of Local Networks of the UN Global Compact around the world. You can access the document here


Brief description of the session:
The UN Global Compact is the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, with over 9500 business participants from across all regions of the world. Crucially, Global Compact Local Networks operate in 71 countries to support businesses on their sustainability journey in their own regions. This session will present practical perspectives from across the world on the theme of:
Better connecting responsible businesses across global supply chains
Global Compact Local Networks operate across all regions of the world, and include companies from the bottom to the top of global supply chains. This segment brings together businesses at both ends of the supply chain, to address how responsible businesses on both sides can better connect to promote respect and support for human rights.
The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights clarify that enterprises have an independent responsibility to respect human rights and that in order to do so they are required to exercise human rights due diligence. In a recent report on the state of play of corporate human rights due diligence in practice, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights found that "Translating corporate policies into local contexts, for example in subsidiaries, is a challenge across sectors. There is typically a disconnect between the corporate level and implementation on the ground as well as gaps in internal alignment between functions and incentive structures. ...An apparent gap in current supply chain management is that human rights due diligence tends to be limited to tier-one companies."
The panellists will share their experience in implementing effective human rights due diligence across supply chains, and discuss some of the ways they and their partners are looking to improve supply chain management in the future. From the perspective of headquarters, a local subsidiary, and a local supplier, the panellists will examine how disconnects can arise between these actors - and identify some of the best ways to overcome them.

Session objectives:

• Illustrate how the UNGPs are implemented in practice, , including some of the main challenges, existing good practice and potential areas for improvement

• Identify the main “disconnects” in respecting human rights along supply chains between headquarters, subsidiaries and local suppliers
• Build understanding on the role of human rights in procurement decisions
• Portray good practices of companies from different regions

Format of the session:
Tentative Agenda:

• Welcome (2 minutes)
• Better connecting responsible businesses across global supply chains
  • Introductory Remarks by Sustainable Procurement & Human Rights Expert (10 minutes)
  • Moderated interactive discussion between business panellists (40 minutes)
  • Interventions from the floor from other LNs speakers (5 minutes)
  • Q&A and Discussion with the Audience (20 minutes)
• Closing & Call to Action (3 minutes)

Audience Engagement 
 This session will engage the audience by using the Q&A and polling application slido,

Brief description of the presentation :
The presentation will introduce how Keidanren, one of the main business organizations in Japan, plays an active role in leading Japanese corporations to respect human rights as well as to promote human rights due diligence (HRDD) in accordance with the UN Guiding Principle on Business and Human Rights.

Presentation objectives:
To explain Keidanren's Charter of Corporate Behavior and the concept of "Society 5.0 for SDGs".
The presentation will also share some data on how Japanese companies respect human rights and promote HRDD in their business.

Brief presentation of the presentation:
Sakhalin Energy will present the main challenges that a large project operator encounters when introducing and implementing human rights standards across supply chain partners, as well as the practical tools from the company’s experience allowing to address these challenges.

Presentation objectives:
The session will focus on thorough bidding process, human rights inclusive contract management, trainings/awareness raising for internal/external stakeholders, tools of contractors’ monitoring and audits.

Brief description of the presentation:
Outotec develops leading technologies and services for the sustainable use of Earth’s natural resources in the mining, metal, energy, and chemical industries. The presentation will provide an overview of how to manage the human rights risks in a global supply chain, focusing on the practices and challenges of a globally operating technology company.

Presentation objectives: 
The objective of the presentation is to describe the current practical ways of assessing supply chain risks and related approach adopted at Outotec. This includes finding the key assessment areas and managing the classification, assessment and audit process, and the related challenges.

Interpretation is provided in English, French and Spanish.

Organized by NomoGaia, BSR and the Danish Institute for Human Rights

Brief description of the session:
Community engagement in HRIA focuses on 'rightsholders' - the individuals whose human rights are likely to be affected by an operation. Identifying and engaging with rightsholders requires trust building in all contexts. However, trust is harder to obtain and the costs of failure are steeper with particularly vulnerable populations.
 
This session considers good practice in rightsholder engagement in sensitive contexts, building on the experiences of affected rightsholders to both validate and challenge the practices of even leading companies. A rightsholder, scholar, practitioner and company viewpoint will be probed during the round-table session.

Session objectives:

• Draw out consensus on what constitutes good practice in rightsholder engagement
• Delve into the barriers for best practice resulting from community distrust, ongoing state repression, lack of corporate expertise/leverage, social marginalization, etc

Key discussion questions:
What should corporate actors to do differently to ensure their community engagement is meaningful with vulnerable rightsholder groups in challenging contexts?
What can they do if the initial approach is not successful?

Format of the session:
This roundtable discussion will start with brief descriptions of rightsholder engagement processes at HRIAs for companies ENI and Diageo. Then the practitioners supporting those HRIAs will describe challenges and successes in rightsholder engagement, followed by analytical questioning from the researcher/scholar perspective. A roundtable discussion session will follow, before an audience-driven Q&A is integrated.

Background to the discussion
This discussion draws on the unique experiences of  rightholders as well as speakers who have either engaged directly with affected rightsholders in fragile contexts or who have conducted thorough scholarship on meaningful HRDD. It aims to tackle complex questions of how to connect with rightsholders who are reluctant to be critical or express personal opinions, fearing state (or other) retribution. It challenges the assumption that rightsholders are eager to engage with companies or are prepared to discuss the effects of corporate activities on their lives, and it examines ways to overcome such barriers. It considers the possibility that companies might initially struggle to meaningfully engage rightsholders but can create long-term approaches to build trust.