I. Introduction

Among the challenges faced by businesses operating in complex environments, security issues can be particularly difficult to address. One reason for this is that a company’s responsibility to respect human rights extends not only to its own operations and people but to the individuals, communities, and states in which they operate. Indeed, this is the key principle underpinning international initiatives such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPs). The twin imperatives of ‘inward’- and ‘outward’-looking security and human rights commitments may not always be easily reconcilable.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) are committed to promoting effective multi-stakeholder approaches to security and human rights challenges. Both organizations are official Observers to the VPs. This engagement has translated into a strategic partnership, supported by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, seeking to maximize the opportunities offered by the VPs through working together with companies, states, and civil society organizations to help address security and human rights challenges. The DCAF-ICRC partnership has developed the Addressing Security and Human Rights Challenges in Complex Environments Toolkit Footnote ¹ and an accompanying Knowledge Hub. Footnote ² These products are intended to provide practical guidance that is freely available to all stakeholders with an interest in promoting security and human rights with regard to businesses operating in complex environments.

This article highlights insights and approaches emerging from the DCAF-ICRC partnership. Following the logic of the project, it is intended to promote much-needed discussion and experience sharing across stakeholder groups and knowledge communities. The article begins by summarizing important challenges, as expressed by companies at headquarters and operational levels. It then identifies lessons learned and relevant good practices. Finally, it considers progress made to date and assesses the challenges that remain in this field.

II. Security and Human Rights Challenges

Although security and human rights challenges are always context specific, companies share many common concerns. These challenges fall under three broad categories which align with key stakeholder groups that companies engage with when managing the security and safety of their operations: host governments, public security forces, and private security providers.Footnote ³

III. Good Practices and Lessons Learned

The issues presented above only provide a snapshot of the array of security and human rights challenges related to corporate operations in complex environments. However, given their prevalence, efforts to tackle these challenges can make a significant contribution to improving corporate security management. Working directly with stakeholders at headquarters and field level, in a process of shared learning and development, DCAF and the ICRC are developing practical, implementation-orientated guidance and tools that seek to help companies manage the security of operations in a way that respects human rights and international humanitarian law. The approach is deliberately non-prescriptive and simply provides a point of departure for the development of context- and company-specific practices. However, looking at the project as a whole, a number of good practices are generally applicable. These include: ensuring internal coherence in policies and processes; engaging with communities from the outset; and collaborating widely with relevant stakeholders.

• ∙ Ensuring internal coherence in policies and processes throughout the company is crucial to enable the implementation of good practices. This requires regular communication and co-ordination between relevant departments (e.g. those dealing with operations, legal issues, government relations, security, corporate social responsibility, and community relations) to avoid duplication, contradictory messages to external stakeholders, or the development of unsuitable policies and processes. Companies may require support in order to ensure the development of appropriate policies and processes. In Peru, Socios Peru, a specialist non-governmental organization, is working with extractives companies to develop new approaches to address security and human rights challenges faced by the companies. Socios Peru uses the VPs as a baseline for dialogue but then translates this to reflect local realities and develop solutions that respond to local needs. This approach benefits from the multi-stakeholder dynamics created by the national VPs working group—which includes six VPs member companies and eight governments.

• ∙ Good community relations is possibly the best risk reduction strategy a company could have. This means engaging with communities as early as possible on security arrangements, showing respect for the local culture, sharing information about potential risks and impacts, ensuring all groups are adequately represented in consultations, and establishing locally appropriate processes to jointly address challenges. This requires time, flexibility, and openness. While company-community relations will not guarantee the absence of disagreements or even some tensions, it establishes a framework of mutual trust and dialogue which is the essence of a prevention-based approach to security and human rights. In 2013, Kosmos Energy started Cameroon’s first ever onshore oil project.Footnote ⁷ This meant that the security and human rights challenges were new to all the stakeholders involved. Accordingly, in order to address potential risks linked to its security arrangements, community engagement was prioritized in developing the company’s approach to training public security forces. Through a partnership with the NGO Fund for Peace, a process of close engagement with community leaders and other prominent community representatives was developed in order to provide the basis for the design of human rights training for the military unit responsible for extractive operations security. The insights gained from communities ensured a focus on the actual challenges faced on the ground. It also enabled the mainstreaming of values shared between the armed forces and communities—family, honour, respect, and human security—in the design and roll out of the training.

• ∙ Working with host and home governments, companies, industry associations, civil society organizations and other relevant stakeholders is likely to offer the most effective route to addressing sensitive security and human rights issues. A multi-stakeholder approach not only provides perspective, but also enables collective learning and the pooling of resources while lending legitimacy to any measures taken. Multi-stakeholder forums such as the VPs Working Groups established in some countries, provide exactly this kind of platform for discussion around security challenges and how to address them. Since 2012, regular multi-stakeholder security meetings have been held in Lubumbashi to discuss challenges and share good practices around extractives operations in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Footnote ⁸ Participation is open to all extractives companies in the area, local public institutions, public security forces, private security companies, human rights organizations, and the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). This multi-stakeholder forum pools knowledge to address day-to-day security challenges. At the same time, the meetings have an important confidence-building dimension across companies, public authorities, and civil society organizations.

IV. Conclusion

A willingness to exchange frankly across stakeholder groups on what works and what does not is an essential pre-requisite to learning lessons and identifying better ways of doing business. This is the real value-add of multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the VPs. Drawing on this experience, two general observations seem particularly relevant.

First, it is essential to bridge gaps between policy and practice. Principles and policy documents establish a baseline of acceptable norms and standards. They do not provide the level of granularity to allow field and headquarters personnel to establish specific policies and management processes or to develop operational guidance that can be applied on the ground. Such guidelines need to be translated into tools that are adaptable to the realities and constraints faced by individual companies and the contexts in which they operate. There is a careful balance to be struck to ensure that guidance is neither so general as to be practically useless nor so specific as to be irrelevant beyond a particular place and time. Moreover, the process is as important as the result. Good practices that emerge as the result of a process of co-development with companies and other stakeholders are much more likely to be implemented.

Second, stovepiping of actors and approaches remains a reality, resulting in lost knowledge and unrealized synergies. The business and human rights and security sector reform (SSR) communities provide a case in point. On the one hand, the business and human rights community can tap into both the operational experience and the political and governance dynamics that underpin the SSR approach to supporting effective, well managed, and democratically-accountable security sectors. On the other hand, the SSR community is only just beginning to think about how private actors fit within SSR approaches and can profit greatly from the significant advances made in the business and human rights field. However, interactions to date between the two knowledge communities are few and ad hoc. In short, there is much to be gained from mutual exchange and sufficiently blended interests to make such cooperation feasible.

The DCAF-ICRC partnership was established to facilitate understanding of challenges on the ground, develop practical guidance and tools, and promote knowledge sharing. These goals can only be achieved through close co-operation and engagement with different stakeholders at headquarters and in the field. We hope that this article may contribute to building bridges and establishing partnerships that can help to address security and human rights challenges in complex environments.Footnote ⁹