" C7 Communiqué " 12 April 2023

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Business and Human Rights/Labour

More than ten years after unanimous endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, we have seen some significant progress in certain areas. However, implementation of the principles remains uneven: while some countries have demonstrated leadership by introducing legislative measures and National Action Plans (NAPs), most have not. With this absence of state action, 78% of the most influential companies globally still do not conduct human rights due diligence. Global challenges, including COVID-19, the climate crisis, and a shrinking civic space, continue to adversely impact marginalised and vulnerable people, including women, children, older people, human rights defenders, migrants, and indigenous and minority groups. Forced labour, including state-sponsored, and child labour remains endemic. Discrimination and gaps in labour conditions due to gender, sexual orientation, employment and citizenship status, age, disability, and ethnicity prevail. Remediation for corporate-related harm is not sufficiently available. There is an urgent need for G7 leaders to accelerate implementation of international human rights and environmental standards.

• Support the UN Binding Treaty on business and human rights.
• Adopt and enforce mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation, which is modelled on existing international standards, includes liability provisions, and requires businesses to identify, prevent and mitigate harm across entire value chains, including by undertaking safe and meaningful stakeholder engagement at all stages and protecting human rights defenders.
• Take action to eliminate child and forced labour, including by introducing and enforcing import controls on products linked with private and/or state-imposed forced labour, and addressing circumvention of such controls.
• Ensure global advancement of such legislation so that effective implementation in countries that have already enacted appropriate measures is not undermined.
• Develop, enact and periodically update NAPs, including through encouraging the introduction of NAPs globally.
• Remove barriers to migrant workers’ access to decent work opportunities in destination countries via safer legal pathways for labour mobility, and decouple work and residence visas to ensure meaningful freedom to change employment.
• Address discrimination and differential labour standards due to gender, age, race, disability and formality of the labour market.
• Expand social protection to protect vulnerable workers and their families, including migrant workers.

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