Submission to UN Working Group on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises

On 1 March 2013, Natural Justice with the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Organisational Development (CIKOD) made a further submission to the United Nations Working Group on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises regarding indigenous peoples, business and human rights.

The submission was in response to a concept and discussion note prepared by the Working Group, given its decision to submit a thematic report to the 68th session of the General Assembly that will focus on the situation of indigenous peoples with regard to the prevention of negative impacts of business activities on the rights of indigenous peoples.

Public consultations were held on 14 February 2013 in Geneva and these, and other, submissions addressed the following focus questions:

1. Focus: What specific issues and challenges should the Working Group take into account in drafting this report? 
2. Existing guidance and standards: What existing standards and documents should the Working Group take into account in drafting this report? 
3. Existing practices and initiatives: What existing practices and initiatives should the Working Group take into account in drafting this report?
4. What focused insight can the Working Group bring to the issue of business impacts on indigenous peoples, given the role and thematic scope of other UN bodies on the rights of indigenous peoples? 
5. The submissions included case studies on gold mining in Tanchara, Ghana and Lamu, Kenya. 

This, and other submissions, are available here.

Major Publication on Multi-Stakeholder Processes

Natural Justice’s co-facilitator of the African BCP Initiative, ETC COMPAS, has released a significant new publication, “Power Dynamics in Multi-Stakeholder Processes: A Balancing Act,” together with six other Dutch development NGOs. The publication, which has been released together with a web portal with relevant resources, summarises lessons learned from 12 multi-stakeholder process case studies in eight nations across Africa, Asia and Central America. The report includes documentation from two biocultural community protocol processes in Ghana and Kenya that Natural Justice supported. The web portal includes country case reports, videos and evaluation reports from the research programme. 

From the report, “this publication is a result of the Thematic Learning Programme (TLP) ‘Strategically dealing with power dynamics in multistakeholder processes’ (2011-2012) in which seven Dutch development NGOs investigated how they could address and incorporate a deeper understanding of these power dynamics in their work. This topic is important, because MSPs involve issues in complex contexts: land conflicts, natural resource conflicts or farmers at the bottom of the value chain. MSPs are not always harmonious; the stakes are generally higher for some than for others and the various actors may not necessarily have the same level of representation at the table. This TLP aimed to draw lessons for the different organizations involved and to enable them to deal better with power dynamics in MSPs.” 

The portal can be accessed here. The entire report can be downloaded here.