English
မြန်မာ
မြန်မာ (unicode)
United Nations 2016 Asia Regional Forum on Business and Human Rights in Doha
Vicky Bowman, Director, and Rosie Zhang, Deputy Director, MCRB participated in the United Nations 2016 Asia Regional Forum on Business and Human Rights in Doha, Qatar on 19-20 April.
The full Regional Forum program and speakers can be accessed here. This was the first time that the Regional Forum had been held in Asia.
The discussion on Mega Sporting Events and human rights, which MCRB’s founder organization Institute of Human Rights and Business played a leading role in putting together, bringing in Professor John Ruggie, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary General and Professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, was the most well-attended session of the Forum, with strong interest driven by the forthcoming World Cup in Qatar.
Other panel discussions, which involved NGO/civil society, business and state representatives, included human rights in supply chains; the protection of migrant workers; efforts to prevent forced labour; large-scale land investments; the protection of indigenous peoples; the right to privacy on the internet; ways to ensure access to effective remedy when harms occur; and the development of national action plans on business and human rights were discussed intensively in two days among 400 representatives from public, private and civil society from over 30 countries.
Vicky Bowman moderated the panel on ‘Indigenous peoples in Asia in the context of business activities’, drawing on MCRB’s Briefing Paper on Indigenous peoples rights and business in Myanmar. Experiences of safeguarding IPs rights in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, India and Nepal were shared, with a particular focus on whether government legal and institutional frameworks helped or hindered this. Particular examples from Malaysia and Philippines were mentioned in which indigenous peoples’ ‘consent’ was arranged through ‘representatives’ who lacked legitimacy.
Vicky also spoke on the panel on multistakeholder and sector wide approaches to human rights impact assessment, drawing on MCRB’s SWIAs in oil and gas, tourism and ICT. The findings of the ICT SWIA were also summarised in the session regarding ICT and Human Rights, where Malavika Jayaram of the Centre for Internet and Society summarised current hot topics concerning privacy and the internet in developing countries. Many of these – such as ‘The Tradeoff Fallacy’ - resonated with the findings of MCRB’s ICT SWIA.
Rosie Zhang, Deputy Director of MCRB, acted as one of the four Forum Rapporteurs, reporting back from parallel sessions with key recommendations to address salient business-related human rights issues in Asia. The Gulf Times quoted her as saying 'there is greater necessity to incorporate human rights in the national development goals in some of the underdeveloped countries of the Asean region as such initiatives would eventually contribute to overcome their image as ‘underdeveloped, low-wage countries and cheap labour destinations’”.
