"Time for human rights to get down to business?", 12 Dec 2014

[The UN Forum on Business and Human Rights] was dedicated to developing and sharing the best practices capable of shifting businesses from showcase philanthropy to real accountability, from vague aspirations to measurable impacts, and from a race to the bottom to a competition to be recognised as world leading. It was a call for real action; as one panel moderator told his coffee-clutching audience early on Day 3: “I want to see dust on everybody’s shoes”...The number of businesses at the Forum was up on both previous years, adding to the sense that this is a movement gaining momentum...Amidst repeated talk of genuine multi-stakeholder engagement, corporates and civil society shared a panel to report on joint projects...Various tools were presented and new initiatives trailed...[including the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark]...As the dust settles after the Forum, and is amassed on the delegates’ shoes during the hard graft of implementation, we would all do well to remember these words from Nestlé CEO Paul Bulcke’s keynote address: “Lots of good talk, but human rights is about action on the ground”. [Also refers to Inditex, Unilever, Vale]