Where the Rubber Meets the Road - Human Rights, Business and Local Government

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Local is where the rubber hits the road. It’s where people live their daily lives, it’s where we breath, eat, drink, and tread. We spend most of our lives living in a “local” dimension, governed by “local” norms and practice. It’s generally our local conditioning which forms our way of thinking and being.

The first oddity of a local government discussion about human rights (not to mention business and human rights and local government) is that generally when we think of human rights we think national.

Why?

Because it’s national governments and not local or city governments that sign on to international human rights treaties protecting, promoting and progressively helping realize human rights. And as such, it’s usually national government institutions that are set up (and have financing) to ensure that government generally is protecting human rights.

But through programs like Human Rights Cities we are beginning to see local government engaged in human rights. Cities like San Francisco, Graz (Austria), Porto Alegre (Brazil), Rosario (Argentina), and many others have all taken active steps to embrace international human rights treaties and streamline human rights into local governance policy and programs.

Yet, in practice one state agency or institution deals with control and compliance of norms, while another with economic promotion and development. So when we come to the human rights and business discussion, some agents of the state are interested in proactively promoting business activity while others are tasked with controlling it and making sure that it complies with the law.

The difficulty of the human rights, business and local government debate is that in both cases, promotion and protection, national government is usually the only state actor engaged in the discussion. Cities promote business investment. They don’t monitor human rights compliance. At least in the past they didn’t. That’s slowly changing.

Our quality of life, and consequently, the realization of our rights, is determined largely by city government. Our right to health, to property, to work, to a healthy environment, even our right to life is in many ways made possible by local laws and norms. Local governments have the daily responsibility of ordering and disordering our lives. They generally direct our traffic. They decide where we can and can’t go. They decide where to allow people to live, commerce to operate and industries to produce. Local government ensures that our trash is collected. Local government decides where to locate our schools and hospitals. City agencies clean our roads, provide our drinking water, maintain and protect our parks, and generally custody the public interest that is most relevant to the quality of our everyday lives. This is all about human rights.

Meanwhile, corporations and other business have some of the most relevant impacts (positive and negative) on our daily lives defining our quality of life and subsequently to what extent we realize our human rights. We live alongside corporations. They consume (and often pollute) our air, land and water. They intake large amounts of natural and artificial resources, consume an important amount of our energy (sometimes most of it), they generate inordinately large amounts of solid, liquid and gaseous waste. They make noise and place big trucks and other vehicles on our neighborhood roads. They put us to work day and night. Sometimes we reach a balanced and sustainable coexistence with business, but sometimes we don’t.

So where does the city come down on this balance? In terms of regulations, cities issue operating permits to business (probably their most relevant leverage over business). Cities decide where businesses can locate which in turn influences where business impacts people and communities. They also issue tax incentives and credits, while imposing others. City government might (and should) monitor corporate waste or gaseous or liquid effluents that can have large impacts on human health. Cities generally have a say on how business handles its’ transport and transit which will result in more or less congestion, reduced or heightened traffic accidents, and lower or higher exhaust exposure to residential communities and particularly to vulnerable groups.

But cities don’t think of these issues as human rights issues per sé, even if they indeed are. They see them as city ordinance issues, if at all and limit their control functions to the logical construct of the actor and the related state agency and regulations under which a control function might apply. The missing element is clearly the victim in the equation. While a city government might control the smoke emitted from a factory, it is not necessarily oriented towards providing community residents with solutions to their health problems as a consequence of breathing contaminated air. Further, the general state of health of the community may be unknown, to the point that public illness may have little relevance over city inspections, tougher laws, or ongoing controls over polluting industries. This is a typical gap in a human rights accountability of government over non-state actors presently in much debate at the international level.

Some cities have recognized this shortfall, and have embraced human rights approaches to some aspects of city governance. San Francisco, for example has adopted CEDAW, convinced that it has a calling to ensure non-discrimination for women. The city sees human rights realization as a precondition for equitable and effective local development and it is concerned that its’ businesses are helping realize this right.

So what can cities do to better assume their responsibility for human rights compliance of the corporate sector?

The first step for cities is to identify how local business might affect human rights. Where are the risks? Is it drinking water contamination? labor conditions? natural resources? transit? labor?

The second step is to set out priorities and develop a sense of identity around human rights issues, which will invariably lead to the formulation of local human rights policy. Where does the city see its’ role? Where can and should it have a say in determining human rights outcomes? and subsequently, are its policies, programs and departments oriented to help protect and promote the realization of these relevant rights?

Finally, the city should monitor, control and ensure that third party actors (such as business) comply giving victims due recourse to justice in the event things go wrong.

Are the proper incentives, policy, programs and institutions in place to promote human rights, to protect victims? and/or to ensure compliance by non-state actors?

For example, a city promoting non-discrimination might survey business and other institutions to ensure that there is equal pay for equal work, or promote gender and race balance (in proportions to the city population) in positions of power.

The city might also look more closely at conditions for operating permit issuance, or beef up its’ monitoring of social and environmental impacts of industry in line with its’ human rights priorities.

A human rights approach to local government, and to corporate compliance of human rights at the local level, begins with the focus on the individual and on the collective community’s well being and human rights realization, and then to focus on how local activity of local actors might affect those rights. It prioritizes human rights protection and seconds other interests (such as economic development) to the precondition that human rights are protected and upheld.

Local government, human rights and business, have much to do with one another, if albeit human rights are generally not on the minds of our mayors and city council members. Recent trends in city adherence to international human rights principles and treaties, and emerging human rights policy and programs at the city level, suggest that this will soon change!