The prospect of binding norms governing the behaviour of multinational
corporations has been dealt a severe blow by the United Nations special
representative appointed last year to look into the matter.
In
an interim 22-page report, Harvard professor John Ruggie takes the view
that draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations
drawn up by a subcommission of the UN Commission on Human Rights three
years ago are too problematic to be taken further.
The Norms
seek to lay out a framework that, although voluntary in nature, would
enjoin corporations to act in a socially responsible manner, with
monitoring of their activities and, if they failed to act
appropriately, the prospect of legal challenge as the human rights
standards became accepted practice.
But Ruggie says that the
Norms have become ‘engulfed by [their] own doctrinal excesses’ and adds
that ‘even leaving aside the highly contentious though largely symbolic
proposal to monitor firms and provide for reparation payments to
victims, its exaggerated legal claims and conceptual ambiguities
created confusion and doubt even among many mainstream international
lawyers’.
The special representative does not reject ‘innovative
solutions’ that would lead to ‘the further evolution of international
and domestic legal principles in relation to corporations’, but says
the ‘flaws’ in the Norms make this more difficult to achieve because
they have sparked ‘divisive debate’ that ‘obscures rather than
illuminates promising areas of consensus’.
He argues that, in
practice, implementation of the Norms would mean that if governments
were unable or unwilling to act on human rights then ‘the job would be
transferred to corporations’ – a state of affairs he describes as
‘deeply troubling’.
Ruggie,
who was UN assistant
secretary-general between 1997 and 2001, was appointed special
representative to look at issues surrounding the Norms, which created
consternation among some, though by no means all, business groups (EP7, issue 5, p7). He will deliver his final report in 2007.
