As the final touches were being put to Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedoms, a rich discussion on human rights was hotting up in Berlin.  National and international representatives of industry, commerce, politics, civil society and academia had come together at the ‘That’s Right’ conference to exchange views and ideas on the topic of corporate responsibility for human rights.  Yahoo!’s BHRP was thrilled to contribute.

Hosted by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the event was led by Professor John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative for human rights and trans-national corporations, who held a lively ‘town hall’ meeting in the morning, giving participants an opportunity to engage in direct dialogue on the practical implementation of his policy framework: Protect, Respect, Remedy.  Later in the day, the Special Representative praised the Global Network Initiative, which Yahoo! co-founded, and called for European ICT companies to sign up as members.

Yahoo!’s BHRP participated alongside Microsoft and Google in a panel session in the afternoon on the topic of “which approaches can be taken when national legislation is incompatible with internationally recognised human rights”.  After keynotes from the highly respected speakers Lene Wendland, Officer of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center and Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China, the companies shared their experiences and approach to addressing the challenges of incompatibility between national laws and human rights.

I outlined how Yahoo!’s BHRP is integrating human rights issues into the way we make business decisions across our organisation and gave some examples of how that integration has already paid dividends for the promotion of free expression and privacy, e.g. our human rights impact assessment in Vietnam, which resulted in our decision to manage and operate Yahoo!’s Vietnamese language services out of Singapore so the services would be governed by laws with stronger protections than in Vietnam today.

I also contended that it would be a mistake to focus only on countries with a poor record on human rights, as is illustrated by a recent Belgian court judgment against Yahoo!, and that such cases show the importance of implementing practices, such as those recommended by the GNI, consistently, throughout an organization, not just vis-à-vis certain countries.

The panel took questions ranging from Google’s recent China announcement, to the practical difficulties of respecting local content standards in the context of global products such as YouTube and Flickr, to the question of corporate accountability, which panel member Alexis Krajeski of F&C Management Ltd. explained was an important focus area for the GNI.

It was a privilege to contribute to the debate and to have the opportunity to learn and share ideas.  Yahoo!’s BHRP looks forward to continued efforts on these topics and to a positive outcome of the Special Representative’s mandate.

To share your views, please comment below, or join the debate on the Special Representative’s forum, at http://www.srsgconsultation.org.

by Jen Swallow| Legal Director EMEA | Product Compliance