Portal highlights workers’ issues to promote rights

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has created a free human rights portal to promote improvements in workers’ conditions.

The portal will provide news of industrial actions as well as regularly updated information on abuses – such as where workers are prevented from organising or where union members are dismissed or attacked – as well as providing information on companies’ constructive projects and international standards of freedom of association.

This includes details of the right to form trade unions, union bans, regulations that affect union rights and lobbying against union rights.

Speaking at the portal’s launch at the International Labour Organization in Geneva last month, project manager Mauricio Lazala said: “Too often, labour and human rights are treated as two separate issues. The right of workers to organise is a fundamental human right.

“The portal will give practical assistance to NGOs and trade unions, companies, governments, media, investors, academics, consumers and others.”

Menno Kamminga, international law professor at Maastricht University, said: “The centre created this portal to make it transparent for all to see which companies are respecting the internationally-recognised human right of workers to form unions and to defend their rights.”