Lack of efforts to stop human rights abuses in public sector purchases
The purchase by the public sector of the goods and services it needs to carry out its functions- public procurement - is a major component of the overall global economy, accounting for €1000 billion per year and on average 12% of GDP in OECD countries.
The report, Public Procurement and Human Rights: A Survey of Twenty Jurisdictions, is the first major study on the subject, and it is the inaugural report of the International Learning Lab for Public Procurement and Human Rights.
Lack of efforts to stop abuse
The report shows that governments do very little to prevent human rights abuses in public procurement, and the Learning Lab seeks to tackle this by educating and sharing knowledge.
Human rights standards to which governments have signed up – such as the widely supported UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – oblige public buyers to ensure respect for human rights in their supply chains.At the same time, the UN's recently adopted 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda highlights the role of government procurement as part of the transition to sustainable production and consumption. Yet, over recent years, governments have been increasingly implicated in human rights abuses spanning sectors including electronics and ICT, apparel, healthcare, infrastructure and agriculture via their supply chains.
Such abuses represent a failure of governments to meet their “duty to protect” against business-related human rights abuses highlighted by the UN Guiding Principles.
"This is also a lost opportunity to leverage government contracting to encourage businesses to adopt sustainable business practices, and to reward those businesses that already manage human rights risks effectively," says Claire Methven O'Brien, lead author of the report and Strategic Advisor on Human Rights and Business at The Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR).
Key findings
Based on information provided by human rights organisations and experts across 20 jurisdictions (including the EU, U.S., UK and Denmark ), the report finds that, in general, existing public procurement standards fail to recognise states’ legal duties to avoid human rights abuses. Moreover monitoring of conditions across government supply chains to detect abuses such as human trafficking and child labour is an extremely rare occurrence, and procurement officials lack tools and guidance to help them navigate and effectively address these issues.
The report concludes that there is an urgent need for governments to drive greater coherence between public procurement laws, policies and practices, on one hand, and government goals and commitments on human rights and sustainable development, on the other.
"The current gaps in guidance from government leave public buyers uncertain about the scope of their responsibilities, where the big risks lie, and what techniques and tools they can lawfully deploy to address them”, saysClaire Methven O'Brien.
A way forward
The study serves as the inaugural report of the International Learning Lab on Public Procurement and Human Rights. The Learning Lab is a global network that aims at generating knowledge, tools and guidance, and building the capacity of procurement agencies to integrate human rights into purchasing. The Learning Lab seeks to solve the problem pointed out in the report, namely a lack of “policy coherence” between procurement and other areas of government responsibility, and public buyers’ lack of techniques and tools on human rights.
The Learning Lab’s new website will function as a place to collect, display and share knowledge on public procurement and human rights. The aim is to create dialogue and spread learnings between key actors in public procurement such as government procurement agencies, purchasing officers and procurement professional associations.
“Our first report shows that there is a long journey ahead to integrate respect for human rights into public purchasing. But it also shows that there are green shoots of innovation emerging. Swedish local authorities, and the UK universities, for example, are leveraging their collective spending power to reduce worker abuses through new clauses in contracts for products as diverse as surgical gloves and Apple computers. Our aim is that the Lab will provide a platform to capture such innovations and disseminate them globally, so we can speed up and scale up the pace of progress in tackling human rights abuses in the public supply base,” says Claire Methven O’Brien.
The International Learning Lab on Public Procurement and Human Rights is co-organised by The Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), The International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), and The Harrison Institute for Public Law at Georgetown University.