Category: human rights

Blog: We need a new law to protect human rights and the environment

We urgently need a new UK law to hold companies and the public sector to account when they fail to prevent human rights abuses and environmental harms in their global value chains.

Nothing illustrates how broken the global procurement system is better than examining who gets what and how, at the top and the bottom of the global supply chain.

As exposed on Channel 4 News last week, the non-government organisation, All the Citizens (represented by Wilson Solicitors LLP), settled its claim in the high court to challenge the government’s procurement processes in relation to modern slavery.

UNISON has been working with allies – including Pensions and Investment Research Consultants, which advises UK local authority pension funds, and Nusrat Uddin, a solicitor at Wilson’s – to expose the systemic abuse of workers in PPE and other public sector supply chains.

The legal settlement clarifies that publicly owned NHS Supply Chain seriously breached its legal obligations by not properly checking the information provided by Malaysian PPE manufacturer Supermax, in relation to its modern slavery standards.

The company has faced persistent allegations of the use of forced labour involving its migrant workforce.

The International Labour Organisation has 11 indicators for modern slavery, including the retention of employees’ identity documents by employers, withholding of wages, debt bondage and abusive working and living conditions.

NHS Supply Chain will now have to conduct a new procurement exercise for PPE gloves and only award to suppliers assessed as ‘low’ risk for modern slavery.

I believe this is a significant win, but Supermax is just one of many suppliers to the public sector whose products are riddled with modern slavery and union busting.

Workers at home or abroad can rarely bring cases like this to UK courts, because the law is not fit for purpose. And when they do, as in this case, there is no justice for the workers in the form of apologies or compensation.

But we can be hopeful, because things are changing across Europe.

Countries including France, Germany and Norway have already passed laws requiring companies to undertake robust human rights and environmental due diligence across their supply chains or face civil liability.

There will be EU-wide regulation too. This means that commercial organisations captured by the law will have to proactively identify and manage actual and potential human rights risks for workers in their operations, supply chains and services that they use.

But here in the UK, while we have a Conservative government ideologically wedded to corporate voluntarism, things won’t change. This is a business-as-usual approach, where commercial organisations can choose the labour rights and environmental standards they wish to meet without fear of being held accountable for the harm they cause.

That’s why at UNISON, working with allies such as the Corporate Justice Coalition, we are committed to calling for a new UK business, human rights and environment act to hold companies to account when they fail to prevent human rights abuses and environmental harms in global and local value chains through.

This is an important issue for all trade unions, and the Supermax case shows exactly why the public sector should be included within the scope of such a UK law too.

Watch a recording of an online meeting on labour standards in the rubber glove industry

The article Blog: We need a new law to protect human rights and the environment first appeared on the UNISON National site.

Blog: Help us fight back against the government’s ‘Rights Removal Bill’

Your basic right to justice could be taken away, but at UNISON we’re doing everything we can to stop the #RightsRemovalBill.

This is another ambush from the Westminster government on our basic rights, and it’ll hit the most vulnerable hardest.

Our human rights are the basic rights and freedoms that we all rely on every day, even when we don’t realise it. They belong to us and are protected in law by the Human Rights Act.

But the proposed Bill of Rights – we’re calling it the Rights Removal Bill – is being forced through Parliament against all advice, and with no rationale except to prove the government can dominate the powerless.

Parents trying to get an education for their disabled child, older people trying to get decent care, and families seeking a safe and secure home, all rely on their human rights to challenge wrong decisions or harmful policies, to try and make their lives better.

The government is deliberately peddling negative stereotypes and debunked narratives to get this bill through, as well as minimising it as just a ‘tweak’ to ‘strengthen rights’. The Rights Removal Bill does not create new rights or strengthen existing protections; it only removes access to, and weakens the rights we already have.

Even the government’s own, lengthy and expensive independent Human Rights Act Review, which UNISON gave evidence to, said change wasn’t necessary and that, if anything, the problem was that too few people understood how the current system worked – not that it needed to change.

Both Scottish and Welsh governments issued strongly worded statements outlining their concerns with the UK government’s proposals, but those voices are being dismissed as it pushes ahead anyway.

In Northern Ireland, by undermining the European Court of Human Rights within the UK, the bill risks jeopardising the Good Friday Agreement and the political and policing structures that ensure peace and stability. This cavalier attitude to the impact on devolution risks legal chaos and confusion.

This bill will limit access to justice for all of us by placing new hurdles in the way of our right to be heard. It will create a new imbalance of power in favour of the state, losing rights explicitly designed to curb abuse by the state, and creating different categories of ‘humans’ based on the government’s determination of who deserves ‘human’ rights and who doesn’t.

The bill will result in more cases having to be go to European courts rather than British ones, and will limit freedom of speech – including whistleblowing – while pretending to enhance it.

UNISON nationally is working on this with a coalition of civil rights groups including Liberty, Amnesty and the British Institute of Human Rights.

Together, we must act now to stop the bill.

You can help with just two minutes of your time – have your say on the new bill.

The article Blog: Help us fight back against the government’s ‘Rights Removal Bill’ first appeared on the UNISON National site.