Spain approves its National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights

On the 28th of July, the Council of Ministers in Spain approved the National Action plan on Business and Human Rights. The decision comes to implement the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

The Council’s decision arrives four years after the Foreign Ministry’s Human Rights Office announced its intention to open a dialogue with civil society in order to elaborate the document, which should fulfill Spain’s international commitments on the matter. Throughout the procedure, different civil society organizations criticized the draft texts presented by the Government. The main point under question was the voluntary nature of the Plan, which did not create obligations to respect human rights for companies, therefore maintaining the approach of positive incentives and voluntarism.

The final text, presented before the Council of Ministers for its discussion in 2014, maintained this voluntary character, while adding a provision which conditioned the commitments derived from the Plan to the “existing budgetary provisions” and to the “fiscal consolidation path decided by the Government”.

The content of the recently approved Plan is not published yet, and changes over the previous version are expected. The Council of Ministers’ press release (see first link above) sets “strengthening the competitive advantage of Spanish companies in the global market” as one of the main objectives. This provision suggests that economic objectives may continue to prevail in the strategy and  in the commitments established in the Plan.