A/HRC/20/15 communities of affected workers. Moreover, workers in the informal economy are seldom organized, and may not be recognized by employers or by the State when they are. Thus the right to health requires the direct participation of informal workers, which may be achieved through the recognition and promotion of member-based organizations. 22. Participation is essential to ensuring that health laws and policies affecting workers‟ occupational health are effective, responsive and sustainable. Workers‟ participation in the right to health process prevents top-down formulation of occupational health laws and policies, while ensuring regulation and health interventions do not become removed from the people that they are meant to serve. Participation empowers workers by ensuring that their views and experiential knowledge play integral roles in shaping laws and policies that impact their occupational health. This provides law and policymakers insight into the social context of occupational diseases, including the nature of employer-employee power relations and knowledge of specific risk factors and environmental hazards. Such knowledge is crucial to formulating laws and policies that effectively address workers‟ dayto-day concerns, as well as to monitoring and evaluating the implementation of such laws and policies. 23. Participation under the right to occupational health establishes direct State obligations vis-à-vis workers, as the State has the ultimate obligation to ensure realization of the right to health. States thus have a positive obligation to facilitate the active and informed participation of workers‟ in the formulation of State laws and policies impacting their occupational health. This includes ensuring that workers participate in defining research priorities that inform policy formulation. It also includes an obligation to raise workers‟ awareness of occupational hazards, the manner in which workplace environments produce poor health outcomes and the prevalence of work-related diseases and contributing psychosocial factors. Local law- and policymakers and health authorities may be best placed to ensure the meaningful participation of workers, particularly those in the informal economy. Raising the awareness of workers requires that they have access to relevant and accurate information relating to their occupational health. 24. The right to access information is central to the right to health and an essential component of active and informed participation. It includes the right to access healthrelated education and information and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas concerning health issues. States also have a positive obligation in this respect to provide workers with health and rights-related information and to ensure that third parties, including private employers, do not limit access to such information. The ILO also requires States to ensure that national health laws and policies provide workers with comprehensive information, education and training related to occupational health. The right to occupational health thus requires that employers make available and accessible information concerning all health and safety risks, including those related to production inputs and equipment, machinery and chemicals used in the work place. States must further ensure that workers‟ right to access information affecting their occupational health supersedes employers‟ rights to protect commercial information under commercial confidentiality, trade secret and other related laws. 25. The right of workers to access information pertaining to their occupational health must be realized at each stage in the development of occupational health laws and policies. Notably, States must make relevant and accurate information available to workers at the very outset of the policy formulation process and during the reformulation of existing laws and policies so they may identify and prioritize areas of concern related to their occupational health before policy agendas are set. States must also ensure workers have a sufficient understanding of all relevant information. This includes technical information pertaining to harmful substances, dangerous equipment and machinery, and all relevant laws and regulations. In addition, workers must also be apprised of all health risks in the 9