Apsana Begum

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) on securing this important debate, which has implications for human rights everywhere—whether here at home or in Malaysia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo or elsewhere. I will focus my remarks first on Bangladesh. In May, the all-party parliamentary group on Bangladesh, which I chair, held a meeting on workers’ rights and labour conditions in Bangladesh following the 13th anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse; we were joined by the Rana Plaza Solidarity Collective, the International Centre for Trade Union Rights and human rights lawyers. On 24 April 2013, 1,134 garment workers lost their lives in what trade unions at the time described as a “mass industrial homicide”. The incident exposed the brutality of the global production system, in which labour rights are constantly under attack. I want to be clear: those Bangladeshi lives would not have been taken if workers’ rights, which are human rights, were respected in global supply chains. Before the Rana Plaza collapse, workers’ safety concerns were unheard by managers and their attempts to organise unions to address their unsafe working conditions were suppressed. A global outrage followed the collapse of Rana Plaza, and it is true that there have been welcome advances in workers’ rights in Bangladesh since then, but the truth is that the gains have been slow and partial, and unevenly distributed across industries. That is in part due to a failure to implement universal mandatory responsibilities for human rights and labour rights. Instead, we have seen the spread of voluntary mechanisms for safeguarding rights. Brands in the global north that want to avoid reputational risk are the ones that implement safeguards themselves. Many garment industry workers supplying the likes of Zara or Walmart do benefit from some of the measures introduced on labour rights, but that is not universal. For those in sectors less exposed to reputational damage, it is a different story. For example, in Chittagong’s deadly shipbreaking industry, workers, including child labourers, still face highly dangerous conditions without safety equipment or compensation on death. Shipping being what it is, that affects nearly every supply chain in the world. We cannot pretend that Bangladesh’s garment or exporting factories are now all safe. As Labour Behind the Label has pointed out, fires at two separate factories last autumn, in which 17 people were killed, have shown the glaring gaps in protections between firms that have adopted the international accord and those that have not. In the years since Rana Plaza, Bangladesh has seen another 7,160 deaths in the workplace—a figure that is likely a gross undercount. That figure alone should tell us that we have long moved past the point where voluntary corporate responsibilities alone can be considered sufficient. As we explored in the APPG on Bangladesh, in response to the Rana Plaza collapse France introduced its duty of vigilance law, requiring companies to establish, publish and effectively implement measures to prevent severe abuses of human rights in their supply chains. We have also seen the EU move to bring in a due diligence directive; Members have already pointed out how that has been watered down. None the less, I think its existence has created a legal pathway, absent in the UK, to provide victims of corporate abuse with a path to actually seek justice. As I have mentioned, in the UK we still rely mostly on voluntary measures that offer little protection to billions of workers globally who work for unscrupulous employers or sectors. In that context, market forces will continue to drive down labour rights in a race to the bottom that rewards bad business practices and exploits or even kills workers. As civil society organisations, including those here today, have pointed out, mandatory due diligence laws are already in force in many European nations and are being advanced in Asia. If the UK fails to keep pace, we risk becoming a dumping ground for tainted goods, with our market enabling abhorrent rights violations. In the same vein, it cannot be said that it is anywhere near sufficient for the Government to offer new business risk guidance to firms undertaking business with settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. That does not meet the demands of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the occupation, and offers tacit permission, dressed in strong wording, for firms to continue to do business with illegal settlements. That settlement trade serves to entrench the settlements’ unlawful presence, while the importing of goods and produce justifies their continued expansion. I want to be clear that that expansion is a violent process of ethnic cleansing undertaken by means of horrific settler attacks, hand in hand with a military occupation that stifles Palestinian people’s livelihoods and demolishes their homes. UK trade policy enables those rights abuses. I note the words of ActionAid, which states that the business guidance “is effectively outsourcing the UK’s compliance with international law to private actors.” All this shows how all-encompassing the issue of human rights in supply chains is. There is no doubt that if the UK Government are serious about protecting people’s human rights, including labour rights, in supply chains, strong legislation must be brought in. I note that at present a model is being advanced in the other place. I hope that all Members will support the calls from trade unions, lawyers and civil society organisations in the Corporate Justice Coalition to bring forward a new business, human rights and environmental Bill. To be meaningful, protections for human rights, including workers’ rights, must be enshrined in law. We can say that we take human rights seriously only when we take seriously accountability for the abuses committed to bring goods to our markets. That is important because every worker deserves dignity and equality, and upholding those rights is a collective responsibility. We fail in those duties if the rights that we enjoy are denied to those in other parts of the world.