Wednesday was one of those truly historic days: one of those days that you know will shape the course of history for years to come - combined with that feeling that we are only just seeing the tip of the iceberg now, and that the shaping is dependent on a multitude of forces that will amplify each other to pull the world in a certain direction. Forces of which all of you reading this will be part… 🌎
I felt the same on that famous Thursday - 16 June 2011 - when the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were endorsed. I was in Kenya then, exchanging messages with the team in that beautiful UN Human Rights Council room in Geneva. The feeling of years of culmination of work leading to that extremely rapid endorsement. 🎉
You blink, and you could have missed it, and yet that one endorsement set the stage of history. John Ruggie’s face would light up when he shared the stories of the last minute political manoeuvring, and how he out-smarted it. We do not have time to lose, and the international community needs to recognise that companies have a responsibility to respect people, as they conduct their business, and that that respect is judged against standards that all governments have already agreed upon - international human rights. 🫂
I felt that way too on that famous Saturday - 12 December 2015 - when the international community came together to say that they recognised the years of work of scientists. They recognised that our actions as humans had already warmed the planet by 1.1°C or maybe even 1.2°C, and that this warming was not going anywhere, until we took significant ambitious and rapid actions to stop it - with 1.5°C as the limit to work toward. Do you remember the energy when Christiana Figueres, Ban Ki-moon, Laurent Fabius and François Hollande clasped hands and raised them in triumph after an all-night negotiation, and the feeling of: Gosh - amazing - and what now? We have our work cut out for us to reshape and transform entire sectors that are premised on high GHG emissions. 💡
And now Wednesday. The culmination of months of political manoeuvring (huge credit to Lara Wolters, Heidi Hautala and others), as well as years of work from many - many of you who are reading this right now. You - who have been working in the business and human rights field - irrespective of how long - you’re part of this success too. Human rights movements are all about people - people coming together to re-shape the forces of the world. This is what happened on Wednesday, with the European Parliament’s approval of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). And now it’s on us all to build on the law, so that it benefits the people on the ground, the people paying the price of business practices that are currently not grounded on environmental and human rights due diligence. 🫵
A new world of business and human rights lies ahead of us, with many many shoulders to stand on. 🌟
Anna 💫
