DIHR awarded U.S. State Dept. Grant for ‘Pillars in Practice’ Programme

This innovative new programme will activate a strategic partnership with Social Accountability International (SAI) to advance the UN Guiding Principles for Business & Human Rights in Bangladesh, Nicaragua & Zimbabwe

Under this new programme, DIHR will leverage its 13 years of experience advancing business respect for human rights within and outside the workplace to advance the UN’s “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework, designed to help companies, governments and communities manage human rights challenges in a fair and sustainable way.

The ‘Pillars in Practice’ Programme will build the capacity of civil society organizations (CSOs) in Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe, to engage with and train on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs). The main goal of the programme is to activate a strategic alliance by establishing the training capacity of CSO partners in each of the three countries to sustainably promote and assist in the implementation of the GPs by local and multi-national companies, government agencies and other local CSOs.

This programme will target three industrial sectors over an 18 month period: agriculture in Nicaragua, garment manufacturing in Bangladesh, and mining in Zimbabwe. The activities will be implemented by a consortium of international and local organisations: Social Accountability International (USA), PASE - Professional for Corporate and Social Auditing (Nicaragua), the CSR Centre (Bangladesh), the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (Zimbabwe) and the Danish Institute for Human Rights (Denmark).

To meet its goal, the ‘Pillars in Practice’ programme has six key objectives:
1) customization of training materials;
2) training of trainers;
3) implementation of GPs;
4) generation of multi-stakeholder dialogues;
5) publication of three case studies on the GPs in action; and
6) knowledge sharing with the UN working group on human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises.

Partners will adapt and customize existing materials for each country—from SAI’s Handbook developed with ICCO – “U.N. Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights: A Six-Step Approach to Supply Chain Implementation” and the DIHR’s Human Rights and Business Country Portal Briefings on Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe— to co-train staff of the CSOs as trainers for private sector, peer organizations and government representatives.

- The establishment of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights has been a monumental step. Now it’s time for the rubber to hit the road so that the principles can be brought to life in concrete contexts and geographies, said Allan Lerberg Jorgensen, Director of DIHR’s Human Rights and Business Department.

-We commend the US State Department for supporting this important next step of the journey and we appreciate the opportunity to work with excellent partner organisations dedicated to achieving this objective.

Finalized in March 2011 by UN Special Representative John Ruggie, the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are intended to help operationalize the UN "Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework. That same year, the United Nations Working Group on business and human rights was established by the UN Human Rights Council. Amongst its members is the DIHR’s Dr. Margaret Jungk. Following in John Ruggie’s pioneering footsteps, the new ‘Working Group on human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises’ is vested with a 3-year global mandate to implement and disseminate GPs.