Why The BRICS Nations Should Embrace Global Human Rights, Not Resist Them

The BRICS nations claim to offer an alternative to world leadership by the United States and its Western allies. In practice though, last week’s BRICS gathering in Russia illustrated once again that while these governments are eager to focus on failures of the West, they are unwilling to acknowledge the need for businesses to address the climate crisis or human rights abuses in global supply chains.

BRICS was created in 2009 by the governments of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa — hence the name. The coalition has recently expanded to include Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia also participated in the meeting hosted last week. While the BRICS was originally created to highlight investment opportunities, it has evolved into something more significant, promoting a new global political and economic force that is challenging the post-World War II model shaped and led by the US and Western Europe.

A core component of the BRICS agenda is to challenge the imposition of global environmental and human rights standards on businesses. According to BRICS members and many commentators from the Global South, efforts to incorporate environmental and social norms into global business are a form of Western imperialism. Countries like the US, Britain and France developed their industrial bases beginning in the 19th century. The BRICS take exception to efforts by the West to impose what they see as burdensome conditions on less developed states in a much shorter time frame. They claim that these efforts are primarily motivated by Western governments’ desire to stifle the economic growth and competitiveness of less developed states, which is not the case.

Over the last 20 years, as China has emerged as a global economic superpower, its development of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative illustrates the BRICS model. Since 2013, China has invested in the development of global infrastructure in more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations. Part of the Chinese government’s sales pitch is its explicit assurance that this development assistance will not include environmental or human rights conditions, in stark contrast to aid being offered by the West.

The BRICS model holds great appeal to less developed states trying to compete in today’s globalized economy. From their perspective, the enforcement of environmental or human rights safeguards impedes their efforts to grow their economies. Why should they be compelled to stop using coal as a cheap energy source or impose restrictions on the employment of children, when these were common features of the growth of Western economies a century ago?

While this perspective is understandable coming from less developed states, it is more cynically advanced by governments like Russia’s. Moreover, the climate crisis is real and existential, and that we don’t have the luxury of waiting decades to address it. Similarly, the exploitation of workers that often occurs in less developed states – including forced and child labor – compels the private sector to take remedial actions now. While ideally these imperatives would be addressed though national initiatives and regulation, in many developing countries, governments are unwilling or unable to protect their own people. Other states are therefore taking steps to address this governance gap and a more ambitious global regulatory framework is beginning to take shape.

The European Union is at the center of these efforts. In May, the EU adopted the new Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which requires each of the 27 EU member states to develop national laws that will require companies to identify, prevent, mitigate and remedy potential and actual adverse human rights and environmental harms relating to their global business operations. These requirements cover a company’s own operations, the operations of its subsidiaries and operations carried out by direct and indirect business partners in their “chain of activities.” France and Germany already have adopted national-level statutes to pursue these goals. The CSDDD is just one of a series of new EU laws that have recently come into force or are being developed.

These new laws are systematically reviewed in a new report, Setting Higher Standards: How Governments Can Regulate Corporate Human Rights Performance, written by Cecely Richard-Carvajal at the NYU Center for Business and Human Rights, which I direct. The report sets out a series of recommendations to European governments on how they will need to implement and apply the new laws most effectively. One important recommendation is for governments to develop and enforce performance standards and metrics by which corporate compliance can be assessed and companies held accountable. This will require companies to go beyond focusing on internal company policies and processes and focus on measures that result in improved outcomes for people and the environment.

As the report rightly observes “the central human rights issues affecting Exxon are very different from those facing Amazon, Nestle, Meta or Volkswagen.” For example, a key human rights risk for oil companies is that they often operate in conflict zones where security forces commit grave abuses. For social media companies, a key issue is the need to address harmful content on their platforms. The report states “because of these differences, it is necessary for governments to develop standards, derived from the broader human rights framework, that are tailored to specific industries and sectors.” While the development and application of such industry standards is daunting, there are useful models that governments can emulate.

One important example comes from the Fair Labor Association (FLA) a 25-year-old multistakeholder initiative involving companies, civil society organizations and universities, whose board I chair. Member companies from the apparel and agriculture sector join voluntarily, but once they do, they commit to applying workplace standards in their supply chains. The FLA Code is supplemented by a series of sector-specific metrics, which are used to assess company compliance. Individual companies go through the FLA’s independent accreditation process, which typically takes three to five years. It is an essential element of the FLA model to ensure they are abiding by these standards and metrics. Companies also are subject to FLA investigations in situations of persistent or serious noncompliance.

As European governments build a new human rights regulatory order, they can and should draw heavily on the FLA’s experience in successfully applying a standards-based approach. Western governments and global companies have an opportunity to adopt a shared responsibility model. This would recognize that addressing these challenges successfully has a financial cost. It would advance a model in which the added cost is borne both by local factory owners, farmers and miners, but also by those in the Global North, including, international financial institutions, governments and Western-based companies who are the beneficiaries of these goods and services. This will be key to successfully addressing the challenges posed by the growing BRICS movement. On a parallel track. the developing countries now being drawn into the BRICS orbit should distance themselves from the more cynical political exploitation of this evolving partnership by countries like Russia and China.