Members of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights, which was
to wind up in spring 2006, have agreed to extend its work until 2009.
The initiative was founded in May 2003 by ABB, Barclays, Body Shop, MTV
Europe, National Grid Transco, Novartis and Novo Nordisk to help
members share ideas on developing their human rights programmes. Three
more firms – Gap, Hewlett-Packard and Statoil – joined in 2004.
Much of the work has been focused on the participants, but BLIHR has
also attracted attention as one of the few business organizations to
support the case for the United Nations draft Norms on the
Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations.
Member companies, among them Hewlett-Packard and Novo Nordisk, have
been individually road-testing the norms, and interim findings suggest
they have found them workable.
John Morrison, director of BLIHR, told EP: ‘The priority for the next
three years will be to look at how member companies can implement human
rights considerations throughout the business rather than just in parts
of it. There’s not a company in the world which does that at present.’
Morrison added: ‘We have businesses from eight sectors, but we’d like
representatives from other industries and to involve Francophone
companies as well as businesses in the South. We’re not looking at
quadrupling the size of the group or anything like that, but we do
expect it to grow.’
