The tourism and travel industry is to receive United Nations help to improve its performance on human rights.
The
World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a UN specialist agency, is creating
a framework for companies in the sector to ‘address human rights within
their business operations’. The framework will be based on a specific
set of human rights principles for the industry, with appendices for
sub-sectors such as airlines and hotels.
UNWTO already has a
Global Code of Ethics for Tourism, comprising nine articles outlining
areas of concern. These will underpin the framework, which will focus
on the practicalities of addressing human rights.
The UN will
produce the document with the International Business Leaders’ Forum,
which will provide input through its own special interest group, the
Tourism Partnership, set up in 2004 for companies to share experiences
on CSR issues. Its members include American Express, Four Seasons,
Hilton, Intercontinental, Jumeirah, Marriott, Rezidor and Starwood.
Dawid
de Villiers, special adviser to UNWTO on ethical matters, said the
Tourism and Human Rights Initiative, as it will be known, will cover
health and safety, commercial exploitation of children, employment of
migrant workers, discrimination, and the displacement of indigenous
people.
The principles will be drawn up after consultation
with civil society groups, partly at confidential roundtable meetings.
The first guidelines will be for the hotel industry, enabling companies
to benchmark their human rights performance, according to de Villiers.
PricewaterhouseCoopers
recently found European hotels are still behind most other sub-sectors
on CSR policies. After studying Europe’s 14 largest publicly listed
hotel companies, it concluded that overall their efforts to improve
their social and environmental performance were ‘very fragmented’,
although the industry’s complex structure was a mitigating factor.
Three-quarters
of the companies in the PwC study publicly reported on corporate
responsibility, but only a third had clearly stated board
responsibility for their CSR programmes.
In 2002 the UN
Environment Programme issued a strongly-worded call for tourism and
travel businesses to improve their social and environmental performance
(EP4, issue 3)
after finding that in an industry worth £75billion ($131bn) a year,
only £107million is spent on holidays and services marketed as
responsible.
According to Richard Holbrooke, president and
chief executive of the Global Coalition on HIV/Aids, the slow progress
to date is partly due to the sensitive nature of the issues involved,
such as Aids. ‘Nobody wants to warn tourists to the Caribbean that it
is second only to Africa in HIV/Aids prevalence’, he said.
In an
attempt to galvanize companies in the sector, the IBLF’s International
Tourism Partnership is organizing what is being billed as the first
global conference on corporate responsibility and tourism, to be held
in Singapore next month.
