Outsourcing Human Rights Due Diligence: "Human Rights Fitness of the Auditing and Certification Industry: A cross-sectoral analysis of current challenges and possible responses"

 

 

This is an age of disaggregation.  Virtually all aspects of social and economic organization is in the process of being rationalized along transformative lines.  That requires, in the first instance, the disassembling of things that were once thought indivisible, and then reconstituting them along (mostly)functional lines.  In a way this mimics the re-assembling of other aspects of social life--from identity, to belonging, and solidarity, and their reconstitution.  In the process, the entire framework around which the reality of a thing--the nation, global production, the economic enterprise--are fundamentally reordered.  With the reordering comes a necessary transformation of the world in which these are embedded. 

The result is that what was deemed an essential feature of these constructs--the state, the enterprise, etc.--is changed as the character of the essence of the construct also changes. For example the assumption that an essential feature of the enterprise was its control over its internal oversight, or that it had to hire its own employees is one instance.  Another is the idea that the essential function of the state is to control directly its own borders.  In the former case, the enterprise increasingly outsources the functions of supervision and accountability; in the case of the state, control of borders can be out sourced to private actors, along with the management of ports and airports,. 

The reconstitution of the enterprise, through out outsourcing and fracture produces its own challenges.  This is becoming especially apparent in the context of the emerging responsibility of enterprises to respect human rights (and also increasingly sustainability objectives). The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre has recently reported on somewhat disappointing studies about the issue:

The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), in collaboration with Misereor and “Bread for the World”, conducted a study of four cases in which certification companies provided false certificates and arguably themselves contributed to human rights violations resulting in grave and fatal consequences for workers, consumers, communities, and the environment:

• In Karachi, 258 workers were killed in a factory fire at Ali Enterprises in 2012, only months after the factory received an SA8000 certificate that did not identify obvious fire safety deficiencies.
• In 2019, the Brumadinho dam failure caused the deaths of 272 people and contaminated a river, four months after a certification company certified it as stable despite ongoing stability issues.
• Between 2001 and 2010, thousands of patients suffered serious health problems because of industrial rather than medical grade silicone being used in breast implants that were certified as being compliant with EU medical product safety regulations.
• The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has been the subject of complaints about ignoring land grabbing, displacement, pesticide poisoning and violence for over ten years without effective recourse.

The study shows that there are structural deficits within the certification industry and its lacking or insufficient regulation and governance across all sectors, whether it is product safety, social (labour) standards, or environmental management.

The  entire report, Human rights fitness of the auditing and certification industry?: A cross-sectoral analysis of current challenges and possible responses (European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Brot für die Welt, MISEREOR; 2021) is worth reading, whether or not one agrees with the conclusions or the recommendations.  The contextualization of the problem, and the discussion of the fracture and reconstitution of enterprise compliance in this sector of activity are nicely framed in the opening of the Report, which follows below.  Functional disaggregation, of enterprises or of states, requires rethinking of the mechanics for protecting the integrity of both and for ensuring that legitimacy and output objectives can be met.  To rely on assumptions about how either is constituted will only continue to produce or exacerbate the sort of challenges described in the report.  

Nonetheless, the process of convergence-disaggregation is a dynamic one.  And the solution to the challenges the transformation of institutional constitution and operation produce may not be the reactionary reflex to put things the way they were before. And yet the reactionary reflex is hard to resist irrespective of the ideological agenda of those seeking solutions to the problem.  First moving back in time is simple, and it requires only the projection forward of memory. Yet therein lies the problem--memory is imperfect, and it is very difficult to reproduce conditions and sensibilities that have substantially disappeared in actual social life. And therein lies the great strength and substantial challenge of the report. It nicely frames the changing conditions around the organization organization of economic activity that no longer aligns with the premises on which accountability structures have been developed.  That evidence  alone makes the report worth reading.  But it is in the solutions that there is much room for continued debate. It is clear that the sensibilities of regulatory compliance models ought to apply in some way. Less clear is whether an administrative-bureaucratization model (long a favorite among public sector minded stakeholders but again with a nostalgia-reactionary flavor to the modelling) along the lines proposed would be more effective than a data driven analytics model grounded on accountability against quantifiable measures-objectives.

The entire report may be download HERE and its introductory sections follow below.