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Januar 2002: Mary Robinson in Tübingen

Auf Einladung der Stiftung Weltethos sprach die UN Hochkommissarin Mary Robinson am 21. Januar 2002 im Fest-
saal der Tübinger Universität über Ethik, Menschenrechte und Globalisation.

The Task is Daunting

T he invitation to give the Second Global Ethic Lecture here at the University of Tübingen was irresistible.Robinson and Küng Linking human rights with ethics and globalisation represents, I believe, a connection whose time has come. And yet the task is daunting. Every day brings further evidence of the unacceptable divide in our world; the harsh statistics of millions living in extreme poverty and enduring conflict. The increasing frustration and disillusionment with market led globalisation is evidenced by the protests at the G8, WTO, EU and other Summits. (...)
Ethics is often the product of particular traditions of a community, either a particular society, or portion of society, or more widely, it is the product of the particular history of large numbers of societies, allowing us to speak of the ethics of the human community. (...) Ethics must be connected to morality. Ethics without morality is empty. Unless this link is there people inside certain communities fall into the delusion of thinking that their own ethical codes exhaust all there is to morality in general. They allow there own ethics to masquerade as true morality. One flagrant example of this was the South African Immorality Act under apartheid. That law enshrined a racist ethical code of the domminant white community that proclaimed inter-racial marriages as immoral.

The Global Compact

A key charactersitic of economic globalisation is that the actors involved are not only states but private power in the form of multinational or trans-national corporations. It is now the case that more than half of the top economics in the world are corporations not states, and international investment is increasingly private. Thus a new challenge is to ensure that such powerful actors in the globalised economy are accountable for the impact of their policies on human rights.
robinson One initiative in which my Office is deeply involved concerns the encouragement of an ethical approach by private business enterprises to their activities. The UN Global Compact, which was formally launched by the Secretary-General in July of 2000, is becoming an overall framework through which the UN is pursuing its engagement with the private sector. It is worth noting that it involves the encouragement of self-regulation, or ethics, to uphold human rights and environmental standards rather than legally binding regulation. However we should also note that there is considerable debate over whether such ethical codes can be fully effective. There is a trend towards holding companies accountable through legal rules for the human rights and environmental impact of their policies. (...)

66 Million Unemployed Young People

With respect to human rights, corporations should ensure that they uphold and respect human rights as reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and are not themselves complicit in human rights abuses. In the area of labour standards, businesses should uphold freedom of association and collective bargaining and make sure they are not employing under-age children or forced labor, either directly or indirectly, and that, in their hiring and firing policies they do not discriminate on grounds of race, creed, gender or ethnic origin. And in relation to the environment, companies should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges, promote greater environmental responsibility and encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.
Robinson am Pult Another critical area where the private sector must play a bigger role, if globalisation is to benefit more people, is employment generation. There are an estimated 66 million unemployed young people in the world today making up more than 40 % of the world's total unemployed. What future can they expect without the opportunity of decent work? To highlight the urgency of the problem, the ILO estimates that the global economy will need to accommodate half a billion more people in developing countries over the next 10 years. The UN has launched a Global Agenda for Employment as a way to focus the energies of UN agencies, The Bretton Woods Institutions, national governments, employers and trade unions on addressing these challenges.

geschrieben am 01.04.2006 um 15:44 Uhr.

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