Fifteen years on, the UN Guiding Principles on human rights matter more than ever

Fifteen years ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council did something it almost never does: it endorsed a major normative framework unanimously. The U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the most authoritative international framework on the human rights responsibilities of businesses, passed without a single dissenting vote. At the time, that consensus felt like an arrival. Today it feels more like a call to action.

The UNGPs' anniversary is an opportunity to say clearly why they matter even more today, and why the intellectual legacy of the man who made it possible, John Ruggie, is one of the most important resources we have for navigating a world coming apart at the seams.

It helps to remember what the landscape looked like before the UNGPs. The debate about whether and how companies could bear human rights responsibilities was generating more heat than light, with businesses resisting formalised responsibility and governments largely avoiding the question.

Into that impasse came Ruggie's mandate as U.N. Special Representative on Business and Human Rights. What distinguished his approach was that he grounded his work in evidence, creating the conditions for a conversation that had previously been impossible. The framework that emerged (protect, respect and remedy), which reaffirms states' duties to protect human rights, articulates the corporate responsibility to respect them and insists on access to remedy for victims, is deceptively elegant. It took years of consultation and considerable diplomatic stamina to arrive at language that could hold together governments, businesses, civil society and affected communities.

Another element was Ruggie's willingness to listen and learn from others. The unanimity of the 2011 endorsement did not happen by accident.

Fifteen years later, that consensus looks increasingly fragile. The multilateral order is under severe stress amid geopolitical rivalry and democratic backsliding. Supply chains have grown more complex, more opaque and more contested. And the social licence that allowed business leaders to engage with human rights frameworks is squeezed between political polarisation and short-term economic pressures.

Some have questioned whether the UNGPs retain their relevance. We believe the opposite: that the case for the UNGPs has never been stronger.

Human rights risks are business risks. A growing wave of human rights-linked litigation in European and U.S. courts is generating direct liability exposure for companies and their suppliers. Lenders and insurers are increasingly pricing human rights risk into financing terms. Community conflict over land use and labour conditions has repeatedly halted operations entirely, the definition of stranded asset risk.

Indeed, it is precisely because the world is fracturing that the guiding principles matter more, not less.

The UNGPs were not designed for easy times, and they do not assume a well-functioning multilateral order. They address a world in which states are inconsistent, markets are powerful and affected people lack the ability to shape outcomes and access remedies when things go wrong. Ruggie's earlier work, which traced how postwar international institutions incorporated social bargains alongside market liberalisation, gave us a vocabulary for understanding why globalisation generated such a fierce backlash. The UNGPs were partly an attempt to rebuild a social contract in which the benefits of integrated markets cannot be permanently decoupled from responsibility for their human costs, an argument that has become more urgent as democratic crises play out across the world.

And we shouldn't discount legislative momentum: one of the guiding principles' most tangible legacies. The European Union's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, and a growing number of national due diligence laws, are direct descendants of the UNGPs, translating corporate performance expectations into binding obligations.

The current headwinds around ESG should not obscure what is happening at the company level. Businesses retreating from due diligence under short-term political pressure are not reducing their risk. They are increasing their relative exposure as competitors holding the line pull ahead on regulatory preparedness, supplier reliability and access to capital.

This is because the debate has shifted from whether corporations bear human rights responsibilities to how those responsibilities are defined and enforced. Ruggie made that shift possible, not least by modelling an engagement that took diverse perspectives seriously and built coalitions without sacrificing intellectual integrity. In an era of fracture, that example is a kind of moral instruction.

The UNGPs are a living framework, tested by a harder world than the one that produced them. The work to make these standards part of mainstream business is far from finished. We know Ruggie's influence will continue to inspire everyone carrying it forward.

This article is also published on Reuters. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy Thought Leaders, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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