"Making globalisation fair", 9 March 2020

Should enterprises be legally required to observe human rights, within their businesses and along their value chains? ...

This question is also not new. Twenty-one years ago [...] Kofi Annan, used the World Economic Forum in Davos to emphasise to the business elite that the economic possibilities of markets across the globe were intertwined with corporate responsibility to support social and ecological development...

[I]n a representative sample [...] the [German] government discovered that not even 20 per cent exercised human-rights due diligence...

Instead of making a quick start on drafting legislation, however, the government is getting bogged down in a pedantic debate about the method and contents of the survey and is arguing about the expediency of statutory regulations...

In 2018, [the report of the advisory consortium responsible for monitoring] said the NAP was unknown even in large enterprises and it played a secondary role in business practice, because it was not binding. There could be no clearer statement of the need for statutory regulations...