Good morning. On behalf of the UN Working Group on Human Rights and Business and the OHCHR Forum Secretariat, I’d like to warmly welcome you to the 4th Annual Forum on Business and Human Rights.

I think it’s fair to say that this is the largest and most diverse global gathering on business and human rights in the world. We have over 2,000 participants this year, a group ranging from community representatives to company CEOs, from investors interested in supporting responsible companies to government officials interested in regulating them.

But as we open this Forum and prepare to spend the next two days discussing where we are in our field and where we should be going, we should also acknowledge the people who can’t be here. Workers attempting to organize a union in the face of a company, or a country, that is determined not to let them. Farmers trying to access land after theirs has been seized by a foreign enterprise. People who don’t even know the term human rights defender, much less that they are one.

I want us to keep these people in mind because the theme of this year’s Forum — ‘tracking progress and ensuring coherence’ — was conceived to make us think at that level. We’re not here just to talk about laws and processes. Those things are important, but their ultimate aim is to improve the human rights practices of companies in reality, not just on paper, and not just in conference rooms...

Since tracking progress is part of our theme for the Forum, I’ll start by saying a few words about the progress we’ve made.

It’s been four years since our field came together to devise and adopt the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Since then, the Guiding Principles have become the definitive standard for assigning responsibility to companies and States for addressing human rights abuses. The Guiding Principles have been integrated into international standards including the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, the IFC Performance Standards, ISO26000 and many more. They’re supported in declarations and resolutions by ASEAN, the African Union, the European Union, Council of Europe, and the Organization of American States...

These achievements are significant. That’s a lot of progress in just four years’ time.

But at the same time we celebrate this progress, we should also acknowledge that it represents only the first stages of implementing the Guiding Principles. Let me turn now to the challenges that lie ahead.

First, in recent years, we’ve seen a global crackdown on human rights defenders, especially those who are perceived as interfering with foreign investment or who push for the idea that such investment should be regulated to promote equitable development. ESCR-Net has documented a 30% increase in threats, harassment and detention of human rights defenders working on corporate human rights impacts this year alone. The UN Working Group has communicated directly with a number of companies and States on such cases.

Second, findings from OHCHR’s Accountability and Remedy Project point to increased uncertainty about when and how companies will be held liable for involvement in severe human rights abuses, particularly when companies contribute to abuses committed by other actors. Many of the places where these violations take place have the legal and institutional 4 frameworks to prevent them, but they’re not given the resources or the freedom to implement them...

All of these trends illustrate the same point, and the reason the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights structured this Forum around the theme of tracking progress and ensuring coherence: Achievements in commitments and conduct are not enough. If we want to succeed in the task for which we came here, we must also see progress in results.

It’s a monumental task. But looking back on the victories of the human rights movement in the last 100 years—workers’ rights, universal suffrage, the widening of rights protections for minority groups—they’ve been slow, they’ve been incremental and at times they’ve been messy. But they worked because, no matter how many missteps they made or challenges they faced, they always moved in the same direction: towards stronger rights protections, for more vulnerable groups, in more countries. That’s what we’re working toward as well...