A/HRC/14/29 II. Opening statements 8. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, opened the consultation by stating that the issue of business and human rights has evolved significantly over the past years. The High Commissioner recognized that placing business and human rights firmly on the agenda of the Human Rights Council is in no small part due to the important advocacy and campaigning role played by civil society. While not all allegations made against companies for human rights violations may be true or justified, there are sufficiently well-founded examples from around the world of human rights being infringed as a result of corporate activity. The High Commissioner also recognized that many companies have acknowledged the link between business activity and the enjoyment of human rights, including through signing up to the United Nations Global Compact, which asks companies to respect and promote human rights. 9. The High Commissioner stated that the framework for business and human rights provided a much-needed clarification of the roles and responsibilities of States and corporations respectively with regard to human rights in a corporate context. After more than a decade of discussion, the affirmation of a corporate responsibility to respect human rights both set a new and clear benchmark and represented an important milestone in the evolving understanding of human rights in our societies. The High Commissioner stated that importantly, the framework also kept the focus on those who feel their rights have been impacted by corporate activity by emphasizing the need for access to more effective remedies, both judicial and non-judicial, for victims of corporate-related human rights abuse. In other words, the framework highlighted the fact that there are three parties to any corporate-related human rights issue: States that fail to protect; companies that fail to respect and individuals and groups whose right or rights are infringed. It is therefore necessary to focus on all pillars of the framework when discussing business and human rights. 10. The High Commissioner invited all participants to present stories of their own experiences of corporate-related human rights violations and examine ways to make the framework operational. She also expressed the hope that the discussions would give all actors — States, companies and civil society — a better understanding of what is required in operational terms to secure respect for human rights in a corporate setting. 11. In his opening statement, the Special Representative described some key challenges in addressing the issue of business and human rights. Firstly, because companies can affect the entire spectrum of internationally recognized rights, and not only a limited subset, the quest to construct ex ante a delimited list of business-specific rights for which companies would have some responsibility is unrealistic. This fact needs to inform the policies of States and companies alike. 12. Governments currently lack adequate policies and regulatory arrangements for fully managing the complex business and human rights agenda. Although some States are moving in the right direction, overall their practices exhibit substantial legal and policy incoherence. The most widespread is “horizontal” incoherence, where economic or business-focused departments and agencies that shape business practices conduct their work in isolation from and largely uninformed by their Government’s human rights agencies and obligations, and vice versa. 13. The Special Representative went on to note that, with rare exceptions, even large multinational companies lack fully fledged internal governance and management systems for conducting adequate human rights due diligence. Businesses tend to focus on the requirements of their legal licence to operate, only slowly discovering that in many situations meeting legal requirements alone may fall short of the universal expectation that 4 GE.10-12935