Concerns Rise as Climate and Environmental Requirements Are Deleted from Global Supply Chain Agreement

The global community is once again negotiating an agreement on fair supply chains. In the current draft, climate and environmental requirements have now been deleted.

Attempts to anchor environmental obligations in the UN supply chain law were quickly abandoned Photo: Martin Divisek/epa

Since the beginning of the year, large German companies have had legal due diligence obligations and must check their supply chain for compliance with human rights. In the EU, the institutions are negotiating a similar law. But there is a third, global supply chain law that is less well known. It has been under negotiation for ten years. This week politicians and lobby groups are discussing in the 9th round of negotiations in Geneva on the third draft of the binding UN agreement on business and human rights.

While the planned agreement is slowly gaining more support among UN member states, a broad alliance of trade unions and civil society organizations is criticizing any softening in the current revision. Corporate requirements regarding the environment and climate were completely eliminated. “Obligations” of companies have been replaced by “responsibility” in the text.

Large parts of civil society are also demanding that the financial sector be explicitly named in the contract and held accountable. In addition, protection of those affected and their access to justice should be improved contractually. Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil also called for a more victim-centered approach.

The scope now includes all companies

In the first days of negotiations, a coalition of African states repeated the demand to limit the scope of the treaty to multinational corporations, as was envisaged in the original proposal from 2014. Because there is a legal gap, especially in transnational operations. States also feared that companies would otherwise shift responsibility onto suppliers. The industrialized countries had advocated that “all companies” be obliged instead, which was already accepted in the second draft.

The EU argued that the treaty would otherwise omit human rights violations by state-owned companies.

Since the beginning of the negotiations, the industrialized countries, above all the USA, Australia and the EU, rejected a binding UN agreement and in 2014 voted against the proposal that South Africa and Ecuador had submitted with the support of predominantly African, Arab and South American states.

No legal obligation because of industrialized countries

The EU initially boycotted the process and reported violations of procedural rules several times. Essentially, the EU and other industrialized countries argued that the process duplicated existing voluntary rules such as the OECD or UN guidelines on business and human rights. Above all, they opposed the legal binding nature of the new agreement. Under pressure from industrialized countries, companies quickly refrained from directly prosecuting companies under international law through the agreement.

Instead, states should be required to introduce regulations for companies. The idea of ​​an international criminal court to prosecute human rights violations by companies was also quickly taken off the table.

Ben Vanpeperstraete from the human rights organization European Center for Constitutional Human Rights regrets that the EU does not want a negotiating mandate and is not cooperating on the text of the treaty. At the same time, she claims a moral leadership role in the Human Rights Council. In this process surrounding the UN supply chain law, “she did not show this leadership role, but rather the opposite,” Vanpeperstraete told the taz.