Ms Mary Lawlor:

I thank the committee for the invitation to participate in this meeting on the EU's human rights and environmental due diligence initiative. I was appointed to my position as a UN special rapporteur by the United Nations Human Rights Council in May 2020. In doing so, the council provided me with a mandate to promote the implementation of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which was agreed by consensus at the UN General Assembly in 1998, and to study trends, developments and recommendations for the protection of human rights defenders - those who work peacefully, and often at great risk, for the rights of others in accordance with the declaration.

At the start of my time as a special rapporteur, I set out a list of priority areas for work as the holder of this mandate. Included in them was the intersection between business activity and the work of human rights defenders. This decision was informed by consultations I had held with human rights defenders and advocates following my appointment, as well as by insights from my previous work in civil society and in my role as adjunct professor at the Centre for Social Innovation within the business school at TCD.

Since those early days, the relevance of business activity to my mandate has been confirmed in hundreds of conversations I have had with human rights defenders. Again and again, these defenders have shared details of the impact businesses can, and do, have on the environment within which they seek to carry out their activities.

There are some cases where the impact can be seen to be positive and a handful of progressive companies, primarily EU-based, are leading the way. Adidas, for example, has been leveraging its influence in response to risks for human rights defenders, HRDs, since 2014, and a small group of pioneering companies have made declarations of zero-tolerance for any act of retaliation against human rights defenders within their value chains. We know 30 large companies have introduced policies which include recognition of human rights defenders and the work they do. However, the vast majority of cases shared with me, as well as those documented by others, demonstrate an overwhelmingly negative impact of business practice and activity on human rights defenders. To provide some statistics, between 2012 and 2022, the NGO, Global Witness, documented the killing of 1,540 defenders who were working to protect rights connected to land and the environment. A total of 680 of these have been linked to business activity, and we can be sure this is an undercount. In 2021 alone, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre documented the killing of 76 defenders and, in the same year, 88 death threats against defenders working in the context of business were documented.

One of those killed was indigenous human rights defender Jose Isaac Chavez, who was murdered in Mexico in April last year. He had been a prominent opponent of open-pit mining in the region, putting him at odds with powerful local actors in an area marked by gang violence. The mine in question is owned by two companies based in Luxembourg, and there has been local reporting on disappearances and murders of defenders opposed to the corporate-run mine for years. While the fatal attacks are concentrated in a number of high-risk sectors, particularly extractive industries and agribusiness, these are only the tip of the iceberg. Alongside its documentation of killings, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre also maintains a database of attacks on human rights defenders with a link to corporate activity. Their database currently contains information on over 4,000 attacks, with 10% of these linked to EU-headquartered companies and their supply chains.

All of this is continuing, or indeed escalating, more than ten years on from the agreement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights which businesses can voluntarily chose to follow. It is clear that the use of soft-law instruments and voluntary initiatives to foster business respect for human rights has not been effective. To take the situation in Ireland as an example, in recent benchmarking carried out by the Centre for Social Innovation at Trinity College Dublin, the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles by 60 top Irish companies was assessed based on publicly available information. Half of the companies scored less than 20% and just over one third were shown to have taken no action at all to embed respect for human rights into their operations. There is limitation in the current voluntary framework and this has concrete results for human rights defenders.

There is a question as to why this has been allowed to go on for so long. It is clear that people stand to benefit from the silencing of human rights defenders, including those here in Ireland and elsewhere in the EU. As time is short, I will talk about the EU's initiative on human rights and environmental due diligence, which has created an opportunity for its members to begin to address this. The creation of binding obligations for business to identify and assess human rights and environmental risks, and to take steps to address and mitigate them, could be transformative. Coming from the world's largest single market, it could begin a sea change. However, in order to live up to the expectations it has generated, the initiative must keep protection of human rights and the environment at its centre. As I laid out in my position paper which responded to the proposal published by the Commission, acknowledging the important role of human rights defenders within the due diligence process is part of the way this can be ensured. In my paper, I outline three means by which the Commission's proposal can be built on to do this. This is the core issue. These means can be summarized as follows. First, obliging companies to take risks for human rights defenders into account when carrying out their due diligence; second, mandating engagement with human rights defenders as key stakeholders in the due diligence process; and finally, mitigating risks of retaliation against defenders who raise concerns about the environmental and human rights impact of company activities. As a proud supporter of human rights defenders all around the world, I am calling on the Government to prioritise this issue. Ireland needs to champion these provisions and this progressive proposal during any negotiations on the text at Council meetings and in the trilogue negotiations that follow it.

I will be happy to answer any questions committee members may have.