PLUS: United Nations Business Group on Human Rights highlights Fair Food Program as “best practice” globally in fight to end human rights abuse worldwide…
In 1993, United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was established “to promote and protect the human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.” The Universal Declaration emerged from the rubble of World War II, in which rogue states and violent political ideologies represented the greatest threat to human rights around the world.
But by the time the OHCHR was founded nearly fifty years later, much had changed in the field of human rights, including the emergence of massive private corporations with economic power far greater than that of many states, and with the responsibility born of that power to protect the human rights of workers toiling in their vast, global supply chains. Sadly, however, the indisputable increase in the incidence of human rights violations at the bottom of corporate supply chains over the past several decades – violations ranging from modern-day slavery to sexual violence and unconscionable poverty – has made a mockery of the vast majority of corporate-led social responsibility purporting to protect workers’ fundamental rights.
In light of this undeniable epidemic of exploitation, the United Nation’s Working Group on Business and Human Rights – the branch of the OHCHR that is specifically charged with looking after the rights of workers in corporate supply chains – has stepped up its efforts to identify and promote proven solutions. Declaring, “people around the world who have suffered adverse human rights impacts as a result of business activity continue to face many serious barriers to remedy and justice,” the Working Group recently launched a process aimed at strengthening access to remedy for workers and communities around the globe.
As part of that process, forty international human rights experts gathered just over a week ago at the headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the gathering was to identify the best practices for protecting human rights in corporate supply chains from around the world, and the Fair Food Program was at the table.
Headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Since its very first visit to Immokalee in 2013, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has identified the Fair Food Program as a uniquely successful remedy to human rights abuse, a rare example of the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in action. And since that first visit, Fair Food Program representatives have been invited to address the United Nations at multiple annual forums, and have participated in consultations on forced labor and gender-based violence.
At this most recent gathering in Geneva, Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, the Executive Director of the Fair Food Standards Council, shared many of the invaluable lessons learned since 2011 through the implementation and operation of the Fair Food Program’s worker-driven model of social responsibility...
