Mr. Chairman, my name is Chip Pitts, and I am speaking on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. For years, the Lawyers Committee has devoted attention and resources to the plight of workers whose rights continue to be abused all over the world, and the need to develop mechanisms for corporate accountability in order to address these abuses.

It is in this context that we wish to comment on the work of the Sub-Commission and its Working Group on Transnational Corporations (TNCs) on the draft document specifying the Responsibilities of TNCs and Other Business Enterprises with regard to Human Rights. These Responsibilities address the need for a meaningful legal framework that will spur more effective business compliance.

The Lawyers Committee strongly endorses the draft Responsibilities. The Responsibilities take the new realities into account, and respond realistically to them. They note the shift in power from states to non-state actors like TNCs, and attempt to constrain the negative temptations arising from that shift in power. They recognize that the U.N. Global Compact has not lived up to expectations. They realize that businesses need more detailed guidelines based on existing norms and legal precedent. And they reflect the reality that other approaches, like pursuing over many years an international treaty on this subject, simply won’t respond to the pressing needs of today. While the Responsibilities could be the first step toward such a treaty, it would be wrong not to do what we can now, in particular for the victims experiencing abuses today.

These victims include the women barred from work because of racial, gender, or religious discrimination; they include children forced to work at obscenely young ages merely to keep meals on the tables of their families; they include other women and children sold into modern slavery to become sex objects for soldiers, or wealthy consumers in industrialized societies; they include those who lose their jobs, are attacked by state security or are arrested or imprisoned for trying to organize for better working conditions; they include gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transgender individuals barred or dismissed from employment merely because of who they are; they include indigenous peoples killed or wounded by state security forces under contract to multinational corporations merely because they exercised their rights to peaceful protest; they include millions of people effectively deprived of their rights to health, education, water, or other public goods.

The Responsibilities are grounded in the victim’s perspective, but have also included broad input from civil society, human rights NGO’s, international agencies such as the ILO, governments, labor unions, and businesses. They present the most comprehensive, action-oriented restatement to date of existing human rights laws applicable to global businesses. Taken as a whole, they confirm in fundamentally new ways (i) the many laws that do indeed apply, and (ii) how they apply and can be implemented with respect to business conduct.

The remaining opposition to the Responsibilities often seems inflexible and sometimes unfair. Some TNCs, of course, will always oppose them because they oppose regulation of any kind, or any limits whatsoever on absolute freedom of action. Others oppose the Responsibilities because they don’t go far enough toward ‘punishing’ corporations. This view strikes us as equally extreme as that of the free-market ideologues, in that it fails to recognize that corporations are also, after all, a valuable form of human enterprise that can make vital contributions to social progress through innovation, jobs, and economic development.

The Lawyers Committee also notes that the Commentary to the Responsibilities proposed by certain members of the Working Group is generally excellent, and provides important and helpful elaborations and even improvements on the language of the Responsibilities. Accordingly, we strongly urge that the substance of the Commentary also be adopted as an authoritative part of the Responsibilities.

In addition, some concepts in the Commentary are so important that they should be added to the operative language of the Responsibilities themselves. This is the case, for example, with identifying "sexual orientation" and "marital or family status" expressly as grounds for non-discrimination.^* Specific protection against discrimination on the basis of marital or family status is especially vital: because women make up the majority of the workforce, for example in apparel and shoe manufacturing facilities, adding these grounds of non-discrimination is essential in order to protect women workers, many of whom are threatened with dismissal if they marry or become pregnant.

The Lawyers Committee thus urges the Working Group to adopt the Responsibilities this year, and to obtain their adoption by the Sub-Commission as a whole without further delay. Both the Working Group and the Sub-Commission can then move to the most imperative project: practical and transparent methods to implement and enforce the Responsibilities. This should include further examination of independent monitoring methods used by NGOs and worker representative organizations, as well as creating a forum within the UN system providing a structure into which activities related to the Responsibilities can be funneled. Without these Responsibilities and a strong system in place to monitor the effectiveness of their implementation, a great opportunity to improve the situation of workers’ and human rights will have been missed.

In short, the Responsibilities represent a major step forward in an area where the Working Group and the Sub-Commission can make an important contribution to this emerging field of corporate social responsibility. In these troubled days of highly publicized business malfeasance, the human rights standards offered by these Responsibilities are a much needed and most welcome instrument for positive social change.