Daily Times

UNITED NATIONS: A United Nations expert group has recently said that the State-owned enterprises (SOEs) must assume a lead, by example, in respecting human rights. It also noted that the governments often ask private businesses to respect human rights, but do not seem to do so themselves.

“Governments are currently sending an incoherent message to businesses,” human rights expert, Dante Pesce, who also chairs the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, said while presenting the group’s latest report to the UN Human Rights Council.

“On the one hand, they ask private businesses to respect human rights, and increasingly set out such expectations in law and policy,” Pesce said, further adding, “on the other hand, barring notable exceptions, they show no great desire to use the means at their disposal to ensure that those enterprises they own or control, respect human rights.”

“The report lists various measures that governments can take to ensure that SOEs fully respect human rights.” It is high time for the States to show concrete leadership, and require the enterprises they own or control, to act as role models on human rights,” he stressed. “Doing so is a part of States’ international legal obligations, and will only reinforce the legitimacy of States’ expectations towards private businesses,” he added.

Many States at present manage very large portfolios on these SOEs, which have in the recent past risen as significant actors in the global economy, both active at home and abroad—in diverse sectors such as energy, utilities, infrastructure, transports, telecommunications, and banking. The proportion of SOEs among the Fortune Global 500 companies has grown from the previous 9.8 percent, in 2005, to 22.8 percent in 2014, with a profit of $389.3 billion and asset value of $28.4 trillion in assets.

The performance of SOEs on the issues of governance and human rights is mixed, with many reported cases of corruption and a lack of transparency, in addition to the harms caused to the workers and communities, throughout the SOEs’ operations. “Yet these human rights impacts, and the duties of the States towards protecting masses against them, remain, largely, ignored,” Pesce added.