Civil Society Key Recommendations
- Agreeing binding norms for transnational investors at UN level
The Doha review process should call upon governments to reaffirm their declarations made at the WSSD in Johannesburg. Governments should actively promote the process of developing measures in the three critical areas identified in the Report of the Secretary General’s Special Representative on business and human rights: the state duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and the need for access to effective remedies for victims, including through judicial mechanisms.
The ILO Tripartite Declaration of Principles on Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy and the OECD Guidelines on Trans-national Companies outline clear expectations as well as follow-up mechanisms to regulate the behaviour of MNCs. These instruments should provide the basis for establishing a social regulatory framework for the operations of MNCs.
- World Bank Policy Advice on FDI must be consistent with Core Labour Standards
Using the platform of the review of the Monterrey Consensus, the international community should call for a review and a revision of the World Bank’s Annual Doing Business Report, to make it consistent with the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda.
- Strengthening co-operation to stabilise capital flows and improving regulation of institutional investors
More stringent disclosure requirements should be established for hedge funds vis-à-vis the financial regulatory authorities.
Higher margin requirements should be put in place for commodity trading, to discourage excessive speculation.
Buffer stocks of food should be rebuilt, to reduce the transmission of price volatility from futures markets.
Strict regulations should be applied to institutional actors investing in food and energy futures, and in the highly speculative hedge funds.
- No tax incentives for retransfer of profits from foreign investment
Governments ought to commit to abolishing all incentives for the transfer of profits. Instead, they ought to boost international tax co-operation with the aim of preventing all forms of ruinous tax competition, and ensuring that tax regimes mobilize adequate resources for development.
- Actively taking advantage of instruments to promote foreign trade for environmental protection and technology transfer
Instruments promoting foreign trade such as export credit and investment guarantees should be made conditional on MNC compliance with environmental, social, labour, and human rights standards and binding transparency criteria. Governments should simultaneously make use of them to actively support technology transfer to structurally weak regions of the South and to areas that are particularly worth supporting from a development angle, such as addressing climate change.