NGOs Warn: ‘Companies Duck Responsibility for Abuse Because of Flawed Human Rights Guidance, Lack of Independent Oversight’

Company grievance mechanisms are more about protecting or refurbishing a company’s reputation than providing an effective remedy to the victims of corporate-related human rights abuse. This is the conclusion of the latest report by Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), Principles without justice: the corporate takeover of human rights. The report examines practices at Tanzanian and Congolese subsidiaries of two of the world’s biggest mining companies, Glencore and Barrick Gold.

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011) set out the responsibilities of companies for human rights and recommended the use of company grievance mechanisms. John Ruggie, the former UN mandate holder on business and human rights and now an adviser to Barrick Gold Corporation, is more sanguine: ‘Companies are finding that grievance mechanisms can provide immediate remedy for certain kinds of human rights harms.’[1] But for the victims of corporate abuse, company-controlled mechanisms offer few procedural safeguards and result in take-it-or-leave-payments or remedy packages which, as a general rule, are not commensurate with the alleged harm that the victims have suffered.

Governments and companies alike welcomed the Guiding Principles as an alternative to mandatory regulation or the introduction of measures making it easier for impoverished claimants to sue parent companies in home states. But, as the RAID report shows, companies have used the Guiding Principles to underpin incident-free human rights reports and audits produced by paid consultants, in order to assure shareholders and minimise the risk of exposure to human rights claims in what is often a tick-box exercise. Those incidents that do surface in the public domain are increasingly dealt with through grievance mechanisms for victims, which are totally under corporate control.

Such grievance mechanisms are now being used in the most serious cases of abuse – including shootings and sexual assaults by mine security or police – thereby avoiding issues of culpability and blocking scrutiny by keeping information secret.  An undoubted attraction of the Guiding Principles for many companies is that they are non-binding and there is no expert body to monitor their application.

The Canadian, Swiss, UK and US governments have also been championing the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPs). The VPs claim to offer extractive companies practical guidance about maintaining the safety and security of their operations while ensuring respect for human rights. A key objective for governments has been to harmonise the VPs with the Guiding Principles, in particular around the issue of companies’ own mechanisms to resolve the grievances of local people harmed as a result of their operations. In a press release, RAID and MiningWatch Canada have called on the Canadian government, which takes over as chair of the Voluntary Principles in April 2016, to seize the opportunity to correct practices that undermine the prospects of impoverished communities overseas to seek remedy for corporate abuse [2]. For the victims of corporate abuse, company-controlled mechanisms offer few procedural safeguards and result in take-it-or-leave-payments or remedy packages, which, as a general rule, are not even remotely commensurate with the alleged harm that the victims have suffered.

RAID’s conclusions are similar to the findings of a US academic study into Barrick Gold’s remedy programme at its Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea. The study found that the mechanism lacked necessary safeguards for women who had been raped by company employees (. The deficiencies and gaps in the Guiding Principles need to be urgently addressed by governments to prevent the spread of bad practice that undermines human rights.