Written inputs to inform the Human Rights Council

This note provides written inputs on question 4 and question 5 of the call for inputs published by the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group on Business and Human Rights. It relates to the February 2020 multi-stakeholder consultation on connecting the business and human rights and anti-corruption agendas.

This guide is a living document that aims to provide companies with ideas on how synergies between the human rights and corruption agendas could potentially be linked.

Specifically, it aims:

Report of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises

This report was prepared pursuant to United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions 17/4 and 35/7. It was presented at the forty-fourth session of the Human Rights Council on 15 June–3 July 2020 during agenda item 3: Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development. 

This one-page flyer invites compliance officers and other company representatives to join a series of private-sector roundtables on identifying synergies in anti-corruption and human rights compliance.

Companies invest significant resources in anti-corruption and human rights compliance programmes, often developing them separately within an organisation. We believe there are synergies between these areas that will contribute to the effectiveness and cost efficiencies of both programmes.

This compendium of case studies and country examples by the World Bank is intended as a reference guide to practitioners and civil society organizations working to shape their country’s approach to anti-corruption. It builds on the existing body of literature, the experiences of World Bank staff around the globe, and the initiatives undertaken in international fora.

The report contains several endorsements of Collective Action between businesses, governments and civil society as a necessary approach to tackle corruption.

This study by the OECD focuses on the ingredients for a successful High-Level Reporting Mechanism (HLRM) to tackle bribery solicitation and other reports of unfair business practices in public tenders.

It covers the methodology and scope of HLRMs, explores its use cases and looks at case studies in Colombia, Argentina, Ukraine and Peru. It then covers 9 key ingredients to the successful implementation of a HLRM.

This brief overview of the High Level Reporting Mechanism explains what the HLRM is and how it is designed to address bribery solicitation, suspicious behaviour and other similar concerns in public tenders. It includes a list of benefits of the HLRM plus short case studies from Ukraine and Colombia.