Assistant Secretary Posner Delivers Remarks on The Human Rights And Business Summit

Assistant Secretary Posner: Thank you all for being here. This morning we opened the, the High Commissioner for Human Rights and John Ruggie opened the first Human Rights and Business Summit of the UN. This follows on the work of John Ruggie over the last half dozen years, and now a working group on business and human rights. There were 700 or 800 people there and it really is a turning point I think in this discussion. It's 64 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted this week, and when the framers, Eleanor Roosevelt and others, created the Universal Declaration it was very much a world where everybody was focused on states. And sixty, sixty-four years later the world looks very different. And one of the differences is the enormous growth of private companies, multinational companies and others, and the need to create rules of the road for how governments, companies and civil society interact with respect to issues of human rights. And what John Ruggie has done as the Special Representative of the Secretary General was to create a broad framework or common platform for the discussion that talked about a government's duty to protect human rights, a company's responsibility to respect, and the need for victims to have a remedy. That's really the starting point for a discussion. It provides a framework and a justification for action. What we're doing here today is to really put meat on the bones and for companies, for governments, for civil society to think about the next steps. How do we make this real and how do we affect real people's lives? These are issues of the day. They're issues that are going to be enormously important in the 21st Century and it was very encouraging to see such an outpouring of interest both among governments but also many, many companies here as well as members of civil society. So now we move on.