The Honorable Barack H. Obama President of the United States The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20500 September 29, 2014 Dear President Obama: The International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) is coalition of human rights, environmental, labor, and development organizations that creates, promotes, and defends legal frameworks to ensure corporations respect human rights in their global operations. We are writing to thank you for your leadership in announcing, on September 24, 2014, that the United States government will develop a National Action Plan on responsible business conduct. This is an incredibly important step towards building coherency in policy, practice, and enforcement of protections for human rights, labor rights, and the environment across the United States government. Business impacts these rights in myriad ways and strong measures of accountability and oversight are needed to be put in place to deter harms from occurring and to ensure remedy for them when they result. Your announcement comes in the wake of active advocacy by civil society groups and other stakeholders for a U.S. National Action Plan on business and human rights, led by our organization. Such advocacy is part of ICAR’s ongoing work with the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Denmark’s National Human Rights Institution. Our collaboration produced a toolkit on both the process and content requirements for an effective National Action Plan. In developing this toolkit, we undertook a global program of consultation with nearly 300 representatives of governments, civil society, businesses, investors, academia, national human rights institutions, and regional and international organizations. Consultations were held in Brussels, Belgium; Accra, Ghana; Bogotá, Colombia; London, United Kingdom; and New Delhi, India between October 2013 and April 2014. We encourage you to engage with our toolkit, and use our criteria as your benchmarks in developing a U.S. National Action Plan. The report and toolkit is available at http://accountabilityroundtable.org/analysis/napsreport/. We expect that the U.S. National Action Plan on responsible business conduct will be a credible, rights-oriented plan to implement and act upon the various commitments made in national and international fora. We further expect that the National Action Plan will go beyond transparency and corruption to include clear action on important issues such as access 1
to effective remedy for victims of business-related harms and the incorporation of human rights considerations into the U.S. federal procurement. Finally, we expect that the process in developing the National Action Plan will include robust consultation with a wide variety of stakeholders, including civil society organizations and those negatively impacted by corporate activity, or their representatives. Mr. President, you stand at a critical juncture where your commitment to ensuring that measures of accountability and oversight are built to hold corporate actors accountable for their impacts on human rights, labor rights, and environmental rights will be tested. We encourage you to use all the tools you have available to build a meaningful plan that ensures that these rights are factored into business decision-making, and to ensure measures of accountability, including judicial and non-judicial remedies, as appropriate, when they are not. We stand by to assist you in this pursuit, and herald the launch of this important effort.
Yours Sincerely,
Amol Mehra, Esq. Director International Corporate Accountability Roundtable e. amol@accountabilityroundtable.org
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