CEL Annual Lecture - Embedding Global Markets: Lessons from Business and Human Rights

The lesson starts with a powerful, consensus-based normative framework based on consultation with all key stakeholders, which shows what businesses and states should do, and which is made operational through guiding principles that provide a blueprint for how to do it. 

The resulting regulation can take many forms, and can come from multiple sources and directions, such as national policy, legislation, and regulation, multistakeholder standard setting initiatives, industry trade association guidance and rules, judicial and non judicial dispute resolution, company processes and practices, and the advocacy of civil society, as well as targeting international legal instruments to name a few.

Speaker:
Professor John G. Ruggie, Harvard School of Government

Chair:
Professor Richard Moorhead, Centre for Ethics & Law

About the speaker
John G. Ruggie is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government and an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He trained as a political scientist, and has made substantial contributions to the study of international relations, globalization and the emergence of new rule-makers.

From 1997-2001, he served as United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning, a post created for him by Kofi Annan and has led work establishing the UN Global Compact, now the world's largest corporate citizenship initiative. In 2005, Professor Ruggie was appointed as the UN Secretary-Generals Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, tasked with proposing measures to strengthen the human rights performance of the business sector around the world. In June 2011 the UN Human Rights Council, in an unprecedented step, unanimously endorsed a set of Principles on Business and Human Rights developed by Professor Ruggie over the course of six years of research, consultations and pilot projects.

Core elements of these Principles have also been adopted by the OECD, the International Standards Organization, the International Finance Corporation and the European Union. They constitute the most comprehensive and authoritative global standard in the area of business and human rights.

Download Professor Ruggie's presentation.