Lawyers Without Borders Canada is pleased to have been invited to participate in the latest consultation, held in Toronto on November 5-6, 2009, with Professor John Ruggie, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises, and his team.
LWBC was able to contribute insights both as a civil society working on cases sometimes involving interrelated business and human rights issues in Latin America and Africa, and as a network of lawyers, including business and corporate lawyers, knowledgeable in the legal questions raised by Professor Ruggie and his team.
Our colleagues of Avocats sans frontières in Brussels had previously attended a similar consultation with professor Ruggie in Geneva.
On 18 June 2008, the UN Human Rights Council renewed the term of Professor John Ruggie, for 3 years, by a resolution that included the following mandate:
"(a) To provide views and concrete and practical recommendations on ways to strengthen the fulfilment of the duty of the State to protect all human rights from abuses by or involving transnational corporations and other business enterprises, including through international cooperation;
(b) To elaborate further on the scope and content of the corporate responsibility to respect all human rights and to provide concrete guidance to business and other stakeholders;
(c) To explore options and make recommendations, at the national, regional and international level, for enhancing access to effective remedies available to those whose human rights are impacted by corporate activities […].”
Earlier this year Professor Ruggie asked 19 leading corporate law firms from around the world to map how corporate law currently encourages companies to respect human rights in over 40 jurisdictions, looking at issues such as directors’ duties, reporting, incorporation and listing, shareholder engagement and other corporate governance issues more generally.
On November 5 – 6, last, York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, with the support of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights convened in Toronto a consultation to build on this mapping work, discuss and reality check legal and policy reform options in this area. The meeting was an invitation-only expert event, with representatives from governments, NGOs, corporate law firms, industry, and academia.