A/HRC/39/48 C. Principles regarding effective remedies 103. Ensuring access to justice and effective remedies can motivate business enterprises to develop and adopt safer practices that engage their responsibility, ranging from substituting less hazardous alternatives to adopting engineering controls to reduce exposure. On the other hand, the impunity of certain business enterprises and other beneficiaries whose acts or omissions lead to the exposure of workers to toxic substances is an impediment to improving the situation of countless workers around the world. The pervasive inaccessibility of effective remedies to workers who are victims of toxic exposures serves as a barrier to the transition to safer, healthier work for millions of workers around the world. Principle 12 — Governments should criminalize allowing workers to be exposed to substances that are known or should be known to be hazardous. 104. Criminal sanctions should be available to help ensure accountability for human rights obligations and to fight impunity. 105. States should ensure that national legislation provides for criminal liability of employers and other responsible individuals and entities for exposing workers to substances that are or should be known to be hazardous. States should investigate and prosecute such cases, ensuring that heads of business enterprises bear responsibility along with other actors knowingly or negligently involved. Principle 13 — Workers, their families and their communities must have immediate access to an appropriate and effective remedy, which should be available from the time of exposure. 106. Workers exposed to toxics are harmed and their rights are abused or violated at the time of exposure, not only when a disease or disability manifests itself in a worker or in a worker’s child. The latency of diseases and disabilities after exposure, which can be years or even decades, can make access to an effective remedy impossible for many workers and their families. 107. An appropriate and effective remedy includes prompt reparation for harms suffered, health care, compensation, guarantees of non-repetition and adequate training for rehabilitation, reinsertion and reasonable accommodation.78 An effective remedy also includes bringing to justice those responsible for exposure to toxic substances. 108. States have the primary duty to realize the worker’s right to an appropriate and effective remedy, including under their laws. States have an obligation to automatically investigate the possible existence of widespread violations after a minimum threshold is reached and to engage in international cooperation in doing so. This should be separate from any investigations or actions undertaken by the victim to pursue an effective remedy. States should ensure the cessation of conditions that give rise to occupational exposures, including changes in relevant laws and practices, prohibitions on the production and use of certain classes of substances and the dissemination of information to prevent recurrence (see A/HRC/33/41, para. 40). Penalties imposed should be significant enough to induce and motivate business enterprises and other actors to take precautionary measures to prevent workers’ exposure to toxic substances and to act as a deterrent to ensure non-recurrence. 109. Business enterprises that cause, contribute to or are linked to occupational exposures to toxic substances have a responsibility to establish robust processes to enable workers to have timely access to an appropriate and effective remedy. 78 20 ILO, Promoting Diversity and Inclusion Through Workplace Adjustments: A Practical Guide (Geneva, 2016).