The Impact of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative & The UN Framework on the Development of the Human Rights Components of ISO 26000

Abstract

This paper examines how the work of the UN Special Representative for Business and Human Rights (SRSG) impacted the development and finalization of the ISO 26000 Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility which was adopted in 2010 with the support of 94 percent of ISO national member bodies. Specifically, it looks at the impact of the UN 'Protect, Respect and Remedy' Framework, which the SRSG proposed and the Human Rights Council welcomed unanimously in 2008, as well as the SRSG's report on 'complicity' and 'sphere of influence and his and his team's engagement in the ISO process. The paper demonstrates that the UN Framework helped decisively to establish in ISO 26000 the baseline responsibility of organizations to respect human rights; to introduce the elements of human rights due diligence as the appropriate means for organizations to know and show that they respect rights; and in clarifying the concepts of complicity and sphere of influence. Moreover, the support for the Framework helped resolve a number of differences among participants in the ISO 26000 process, and increased their overall level of support for the human rights component of the standard. The ISO 26000 was developed through a double-consensus process - where stakeholders and countries participated in the work.