Ruggie’s Draft Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights—GBI and GE Input

John Ruggie has developed a policy framework for managing business and human rights challenges, which is based on three pillars:

• The state duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business
• The corporate responsibility to respect human rights
• Greater access by victims to effective remedy, judicial and nonjudicial

The meeting of the Global Business Initiative (GBI) in Cairo was timed and coordinated with UN Global Compact staff members so that the GBI companies would have the opportunity to meet the Ruggie’s staff and exchange reactions to the Draft Guiding Principles that were released nearly contemporaneously. While the GBI members are supportive of Ruggie’s mission and respect the broad policy framework he has established, going through the details of the Guiding Principles revealed several areas of concern. Principal among these is the extent to which an MNC like GE is responsible for undertaking supply-chain due diligence. We specifically noted to Ruggie’s staff that certain draft provisions extend a business enterprise’s responsibility to “include relationships with business partners, suppliers and other non-State and State entities that are associated with the enterprise’s activities.” This is a very broad statement. The commentary goes on to say that conducting appropriate human rights due diligence should help “…by showing they took every reasonable step to avoid involvement in an alleged human rights abuse.” We hope that by bringing this and other issues directly to the attention of John Ruggie’s staff, GE/GBI can make a positive contribution to the final Guiding Principles, due out in June, by properly placing boundaries on what due diligence and other activities MNCs are expected to undertake in properly discharging their duty to respect human rights.

At GE, we acknowledge that the corporate responsibility to respect human rights means acting with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others. In addition to complying with national laws, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights is a baseline expectation for all companies in all situations. GE’s Statement of Principles explicitly addresses our responsibility to respect human rights.