Corporate support for Pride: back to basics
How can the 2011 United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights help companies navigate the alleged "Pride Backlash"
In today's article on the Institute for Human Rights and Business forum, which you can READ HERE, I discuss how companies should consider their Pride engagement through the lens of the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Business and Human Rights - a framework unanimously approved by the Human Rights Council in June 2011 - as in by governments from all regions of the world - rather than through the lens of marketing, culture or politics.
While companies are encouraged to 'Protect, Respect and Remedy' the human rights of LGBTQ+ people under the Guiding Principles, “acting in the public sphere” should respond to the "do not harm" principle. Supporting Pride publicly is often an extension of internal Pride campaigns and efforts by companies to align their policies and practices with human rights standards and should be treated as such. It is a complex issue at the core of the human rights responsibilities of the private sector.
However, using the cases of The Walt Disney Company, Target, and Anheuser-Busch, I highlight how some have approached this issue with amateurism. Companies usually don't "wing" their engagement on Child Labor, Human Trafficking, or Privacy; why did Disney Bob Chapek or Anheuser Busch Brendan Whitworth believe they could do so on LGBTQ+ issues? The response might be linked to their false personal belief that LGBTQ+ rights are not a universal human rights issue.
In 2017, I co-wrote with Salil Tripathi of the Institute and my colleague United Nations Human Rights Office's Charles Radcliffe the United Nations LGBTQ+ Corporate Standards of Conduct (http://unfe.org/standards), now part of the international Human Rights framework. The objective was to translate the UNGPs on LGBTQ+ issues because we had identified this confusion by companies globally. After the 2018 departure of High Commissioner Zeid Al Husein and Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, the Standards were hidden away by the notoriously cautious OHCHR bureaucrats, which feared offending newly elected President Trump, Russia, Belarussia, Qatar, the Saudis, and the Vatican.
Now that Companies are once again visibly struggling with how to navigate LGBTQ+ human rights issues, I am calling on the United Nations Global Compact to resurrect this crucial conversation and provide leadership to companies seeking guidance on this topic.
Hopefully, this post will get on the radar screen of the various national Global Compact networks.
Happy Pride, and I hope to see you in the streets of New York next Sunday.