Day 2 | 8 June

Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability on Human Rights: Lessons learned from Asia

14:00-15:30 ICT

Co-organized by

Background

This session will explore and critically examine the various tools and strategies used by frontline civil society groups in the Asia-Pacific region to prevent harms and drive positive change in global supply chains. These include strategic human rights and environmental litigation, private sector engagement, strategic campaigns, as well as non-judicial mechanisms such as forced labour import bans and the OECD’s National Contact Points (NCPs). The structure of the session will be as follow:

First, the panel will provide an overview of key developments across these strategies and mechanisms globally and zooming in to reflect on how these can be adapted to challenge corporate impunity and close the ‘accountability gap’ with national, regional and global companies operating in the region.
Second, the speakers will reflect from their own experience and share experiences of how civil society groups in the region are leveraging these mechanisms to shift business behaviour and secure remedies for harms.
Third, we will critically reflect the opportunities and challenges associated with the innovative use of these strategies to shift corporate practices and the impact on the lives of affected rights holders and communities

The panel will cover key trends and developments in transnational litigation against multinational companies in the Asia-Pacific region, the emerging legislations on forced labour import bans, implications of the US Tariff Act for frontline organisations and exploring the new frontiers of alternative accountability mechanisms and broader advocacy strategies.

Objectives

The key objectives of this session are to:

Provide an overview of how civil society organisations can investigate, collaborate and utilise existing judicial/non-judicial mechanisms to hold corporations accountable to respecting human rights in their supply chains.
Facilitate an open and constructive discussion on the opportunities and challenges of key corporate accountability mechanisms and their implications for frontline organisations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Explore what success looks like in corporate accountability and how collaboration can lead to better outcomes to secure remedies for workers and communities in the process.
Identify innovative, under-explored areas in which civil society organisations can strengthen their efforts to adopt these strategies.

Questions

Panelists will reflect on the following questions in relation to the Asia-Pacific region:

What have been the major developments in recent years in using strategic litigation, import ban and non-judicial mechanisms to challenge corporate impunity and close the accountability gap?
How do you define ‘success’ across these strategies? What are some of the key lessons learned from implementing the strategies?
Where do you see opportunities to increase the impact of these strategies? What are the relevant gaps and how can these be filled?
How should we think about the risks involved? What can be improved?
What makes an effective collaboration/partnership in this space?

Speakers

Brahm Press

Brahm Press has been working on migrant workers’ rights in Thailand for the past 20 years. He has a graduate degree in Public Administration from the University of Washington, Seattle, which helped direct him to Thailand in the first place. Since 2014 he has been the Executive Director of MAP Foundation - a grassroots, migrant rights organization based in Chiang Mai and Mae Sot, Thailand. Since 1996, MAP has worked to promote: migrants’ labour rights, migrant women’s empowerment, migrant children’s access to education and identification, and migrants’ right to health. MAP also runs two community radio stations which broadcast in migrant languages. Over the years, MAP has pursued numerous legal cases to assist migrant workers to access proper redress mechanisms and compensation for unpaid wages.

Surya Deva

Surya Deva is a Professor at the Macquarie Law School and Director of the Centre for Environmental Law at Macquarie University. He is also the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development. Deva served as a member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (2016-22). He researches in the areas of business and human rights, comparative constitutional law, international human rights law, sustainable development, climate change, and gender equality.

JC Kim

Jong-Chul Kim is a senior researcher in the public interest lawyers’ organization, Advocates for Public Interest Law (APIL) in Seoul he founded in 2011. His work focuses on the rights of vulnerable migrants in Korea, including victims of human trafficking and refugees. He also specializes in business and human rights and monitors human rights abuses committed by Korean companies overseas. In 2016, the Korean Bar Association awarded Kim with the prize for “Best Public Interest Lawyer.” In 2018, Kim received the Trafficking in Persons Report Hero Award from the U.S. State Department. He holds a master’s degree in public international law from Korea Graduate University. In 2019, Kim was a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School.

Martina Vandenberg

Martina E. Vandenberg is the founder and president of The Human Trafficking Legal Center (HTLC), an organization dedicated to providing pro bono counsel to trafficking survivors. Vandenberg has spent more than two decades fighting human trafficking, forced labor, rape as a war crime, and violence against women. Vandenberg has represented victims of human trafficking pro bono in immigration, criminal, and civil cases. She has trained more than 5,000 pro bono attorneys nationwide to handle human trafficking matters. Prior to founding HTLC, Vandenberg was a partner in a law firm, where her practice focused on internal investigations related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the False Claims Act, First Amendment litigation, and pro bono human trafficking cases. A former Human Rights Watch researcher, Vandenberg spearheaded investigations into human rights violations in the Russian Federation, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Uzbekistan, Kosovo, Israel, and Ukraine. She is a Rhodes Scholar and a Truman Scholar.

Art Prapha

Art Prapha is a Senior Program Manager, Corporate Accountability for The Freedom Fund. He oversees the corporate accountability portfolio to invest in cutting-edge accountability-based programs designed to shift corporate behaviour as a driver of forced labour across all sectors of the global economy. Previously, Art spent nearly a decade working at Oxfam in Asia and in the US. His most recent role was co-leading Oxfam’s global Supermarket Campaign, Behind the Barcodes, to influence the world’s largest food retailers to tackle inequality and human rights violations in their supply chains. Art holds a graduate degree in International Development from the London School of Economics (LSE) and is currently pursuing an Executive MBA at Cambridge University, UK.

United Nations Responsible Business and Human Rights Forum, Asia-Pacific