![]() From then on, a growing number of companies have embraced the concept of Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD). All this changed in 2011 with the unanimous adoption by the Human Rights Council of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights which for the first time clearly defined the responsibility of companies to know and show their impact on human rights and provide remedies when their operations cause, contribute or are linked to abuses. ![]() During the nineties, and for at least one more decade, human rights, and for that matter, peace, were still considered, by most, an issue exclusively between states, what our law books like to call duty-bearers, and citizens or rights-holders. This will hardly surprise human rights activists of my generation. I don’t remember a single time in which at any of these levels, in any of our strategic or operational discussions, the word poslovanje (business ) came up. I worked at field, regional and headquarters level, and moved from OSCE to the United Nations. We were asked to mitigate this imbalance, heighten the attention on human rights abuses and work with governments to hold them accountable for their own duty to do the same.ĭuring my proud seven years of building peace and human rights compliance in Bosnia, I met with hundreds of officials at all levels. During and after conflict, with weak or absent state structures and a breakdown of the rule of law, abuses invariably skyrocket, impunity thrives, and vulnerable people become even more vulnerable. Most of us were sent to remote municipalities where from freezing offices we would receive claims from victims and intervene with government officials to negotiate a remedy for the violations. Our task was to help implement the Human Rights chapter of the Dayton Peace Agreement that had brought an end to the Bosnian war. In 1997, fresh out of law school, I joined hundreds of other human rights officers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in one of the largest human rights field operations ever deployed by an international multilateral organization. ![]() Between 19 up to 100,000 people, many of whom were civilians, were killed and more than two million were displaced in Bosnia-Herzegovina alone. In fact, many of my colleagues from UNDP’s Rule of Law, Security and Human Rights team started their professional journey in the Balkans. My career as an international human rights lawyer started in the aftermath of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the conflicts that followed in the nineties.
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