Drilling for Common Ground

It is not every day that seven giant oil and mining companies, nine human rights and corporate responsibility nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the U.S. and U.K. governments jointly acknowledge that "security and respect for human rights can and should be consistent." But that is what happened on December 20, 2000, when then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and U.K. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Robin Cook unveiled the "Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights."

I had the privilege of leading this initiative on behalf of the U.S. State Department. Extractive companies and NGOs had been sparring during most of the 1990s over human rights and the industry’s impact on indigenous communities. We used the convening power of the two governments to try a different approach: dialogue. The key was picking the issues — what one participant called the "low-hanging fruit" — most amenable to agreement. We decided to focus negotiations exclusively on how to balance the determination of companies to meet real security threats in dangerous places with the NGOs’ insistence on respect for human rights. We avoided the admittedly tougher issues of whether, for example, Premier Oil should be in Burma at all, or what Occidental Petroleum’s responsibilities should be with respect to indigenous peoples’ land claims in Colombia.

The State Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office became involved in this negotiation for two reasons. We shared an economic and political stake in ensuring that those companies continued to operate in countries such as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Colombia. But we also shared an interest in encouraging corporate responsibility to help rebuild the fractured post-Seattle political consensus for globalization.

We decided to address three key areas: the criteria that companies use to assess the risk to human rights in their security arrangements; company relationships with state security forces, both military and police; and company relations with private security forces. We also agreed that the principles would be voluntary and nonbinding — anything else would have been a non-starter for both the companies and the governments. The NGOs at the table recognized that proceeding on this basis was better than missing the opportunity to develop standards that could become the base line for best practices and further scrutiny.

The ultimate challenge lay in the actual wording of the announcement. The key verb was "support." The document had to allow a degree or two of separation so the companies and NGOs could minimize their respective risks: Companies worried that they could be held liable for implementing even nonbinding principles; the NGOs, that their "support" could be construed as a good housekeeping seal of approval for the companies. We struggled but found a formula that appealed to most of the companies and NGOs: They would allow us to state that they "support this process and welcome these principles."

Media coverage highlighted the unprecedented willingness of a critical mass of extractive-sector companies to address these difficult issues. On the oil side, it was essential to line up Chevron and Texaco (in addition to Conoco) to match Shell and BP on the British side; Chevron and Texaco’s support lent credibility — especially important since ExxonMobil declined to participate. Since the principles were first announced, agreement has been reached to invite into the process the half-dozen other governments and dozen other companies that have expressed an interest, laying the basis for a global standard.

The "Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights" address narrowly-defined issues, and the commitment of their participants remains untested. But if this process continues and these principles stick, then a small victory will have been won in the struggle to find common ground between business and human rights. The negotiation may also serve as a useful precedent as the old diplomacy of governments pushes into the still-virgin terrain of the diplomacy of globalization.