Editor’s
note: Benjamin
Thompson is a PhD candidate in business and human rights at Tilburg Law School
in the Netherlands. His PhD research deals with the effects of the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human Rights' endorsement of operational level,
non-judicial grievance mechanisms and their role in improving access to remedy.
He recently published an article for Utrecht Law Review’s
Special Issue on Accountability of Multinational Corporations for Human
Rights Abuses which discussed the roles the new Dutch multistakeholder
initiative with the Dutch banking sector might play in improving banks’
performance with respect to human rights.
In
November of last year the Asser Institute offered me the opportunity to take
part in a roundtable
on the Dutch
Banking Sector Agreement (DBA), as part of their
Doing
Business Right Project. Signed in December 2017, the
DBA is a collaboration between the banking sector, the government, trade unions
and civil society organisations (CSOs), all based within the Netherlands: the
first of its kind. It focuses on banks’ responsibility to respect human rights,
as stipulated in the UN
Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
(UNGPs) and OECD Guidelines for
Multinational Enterprises (OECD Guidelines),
within their corporate lending and project finance activities. The DBA has been
something of a hot topic in business and human rights circles. However, it has
not yet published a public monitoring report, making any evaluation of its
performance at this stage difficult. During the roundtable, we discussed the
role of the DBA as a potential means
to improve the practices of Dutch banks with respect to human rights. A key
challenge identified from this discussion, as reported here,
was the various ‘interpretive ambiguities inherent in the UNGPs’. A key
conclusion was that ‘further dialogue is required... to ascertain what conduct
on the part of the banks is consistent with international obligations’.
This
is not a unique conclusion to arise from multistakeholder discussions on banks
and human rights; the discussion often focuses on what financial institutions
are required to do to meet their responsibility to respect human rights under
the UNGPs. So much so that questions concerning implementation or evaluation
are often left by the wayside. As a result, when presenting my research on the
DBA for the Utrecht Centre of Accountability and Liability Law’s Conference on
‘Accountability
and International Business Operations’,
published here,
I decided to focus on how the DBA had responded to those key points of friction
where there is the greatest disagreement between how different stakeholders
conceive banks’ human rights responsibilities. This blog post seeks to build on
this previous entry, hopefully without too much repetition. More...
On Thursday
(2 November), the T.M.C. Asser Instituut hosted a roundtable on the role of financial
institutions in ensuring responsible business conduct and, in particular,
fostering respect for human rights. The discussion focused on the Dutch Banking Sector
Agreement on international responsible business conduct regarding human rights (DBSA or
Agreement), including details of its key features and the practicalities of its
implementation, alongside the theme of responsible banking more generally. More...