By Gloria A. Anderson
Ghana is still working on an Action Plan to nationalize the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which sets out the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights.
A National Baseline Assessment of Business and Human Rights is ready and the Steering Committee to develop a national action plan on Business and Human Rights has also been inaugurated. The steering committee has developed a zero draft of the national plan which is currently be reviewed.
The next stage is to hold stakeholder engagements across the country to validate the draft. Gloria Anderson who is participating in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s African Incoming Journalists program ahead of the African Union Forum on Business and Human Rights, reports that only two African countries, Kenya and Uganda have a national Action Plan on the Business and Human Rights Policy.
Experiences in Ghana and globally show that operations of businesses can affect the human rights of their employees, customers, workers in their supply chains, communities around their operations and end users of their products or services.
The United Nations Guiding Principles, therefore, seek to make respect for human rights an integral part of business by helping entities to assess the harms their activities create and ensure that they take steps to deal with such risks. Although the principles on Business and Human rights is a soft law, nations are expected to own the principles to ensure that the rights of their citizens are upheld. Ghana is on course to join nations like Kenya and Uganda to be amongst the first nations to adopt the principles as a working document.
Secretary of the Steering Committee working on the National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights and a principal investigator at CHRAJ, Clement Kadogbe, briefing journalists on Progress of work, said Ghana started the process in 2019 with the preparation of the national baseline report. He provides details of work done so far.
He urged government to Develop policies to deal with those gaps that are identified by the NPP, so the process for the national base assessment commenced in 2019.
“In early 2021 the draft document was given to the company to have a look at it. The commissioners and a few of us went through the document thoroughly together with some of the people who did the fieldwork from GIMPA. We saw certain discrepancies which together we all sort to correct so we went through some review some internal validation thereafter we subjected to a stakeholder validation society which was done on the 13 of July 2021.”
The next stage in the preparation of the action plan is stakeholder consultation. Clement Kadogbe mentioned that stakeholder engagements are vital to ensure that there is ownership of the action plan by all.
He said there is a need for education, so for them as a commission, it is important to have a public education unit that does a lot of public education by the requirements imposed on us by our constitution, the constitution of Ghana 1992 imposes one of the functions on the commission to do public education.
“so what we intend to do is to even train all our public educators across the country thereafter they will be in return train the public on this whole business and human rights discourse so we have a plan in place that immediately we finish with the app we will do business sensitization across the country and create that awareness for people to know what business and human right is all about.only two countries in Africa have a NAP currently and hopefully ghana will be the third country to join.”
He indicated that he has been engaging a couple of countries two weeks ago nairobi, some of the human rights institutions in other countries that were presented says government is not interested some say we take three steps forward and five back.
He said most governments are scared that if they come up with policies it will scare investors away but I see the opposite and he believes that when they have the NVF sight event where the African-continental free trade area will be there to educate.
“We want to make a point that this whole process is not “antagonistic” to trade and development the point simply is that even though the state must exercise its right to develop it must also be mindful of human rights. We are just trying to get companies to understand that do business trade make profits but put mechanisms in place to address adverse human rights that may Come about.if you do this everyone will be ready to do business with you”.
“Thereafter the fifth BantaCame from the stakeholders were incorporated and then the NBA was printed into a book and a brill so that we dont leave anybody behind so we considered those with visual impediments to also know what is going on as long as business and human right is concerned.”
He posited that, “ On the day we launched the MBA report, the known 18-member steering committee was also inaugurated to develop the national action plan. Actually, national action plans are supposed to be developed by the state, the state is supposed to own the process so that they can commit to it. And so before we got to that period the one who led the conduct of the base assessment from Gimpa and myself we contacted the then ministry of business development we felt that ministry must drive the next process which is the norm .So we had a meeting with minister for business development and then who is now the minister for tourism and he really bought into the idea after we explained things to him.”
A member of the committee and General Secretary of the General Agricultural Workers Union, Edward Kareweh said the Business and Human Rights policy will not run down any business as is being rumored, but rather ensure that businesses work in a conducive environment.
He said Human Right is built by business asserting hindrances to maximize their profit.
“so they see it as a cause, just as they see non-use of child labour is a cause, because they are looking for all means that they can maximize profit and maximize profit is to minimize cost and that is the real threat and it’s always been there. But you will also appreciate that we have reached a point where even businesses are doing peer review that you are not suppose to have child labour at your work and they have to reluctantly comply with.”
He noted that it is more of a global community now and many countries in Africa and all over have signed up to global protocols which they must comply with, adding that apart from that the legislation of the national laws has also provided the base.
“So if you talk about ghana on human right based on that we also have a whole constitution which talks about human rights. Is built out of the constitution and we are at the point of reviewing the labour app to make it more functional for the need of the country labour challenges and so on, and that’s a discourse.
