The Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee Leads the Race. Will others follow?

This week the Scottish city of Glasgow gets set to welcome 4,500 athletes from 71 nations as it hosts the XX Commonwealth Games. Potentially a billion people will be watching the Commonwealth Games, the third mega-sporting event (MSE) to be held this year. But it is very much the younger sibling of bigger events like the FIFA World Cup over the summer in Brazil and the winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sochi.

Meanwhile, calls for reforming MSEs are having some effect. The Olympic Movement met in Lausanne, Switzerland last weekend and underlined its support for the Olympic Agenda 2020 reform programme which will be voted on in December. But it is noteworthy that the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee has stolen a march on both FIFA and Olympic organisers with regard to human rights.

Late last year the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee became the first MSE organising committee or delivery body to release an explicit human rights statement. Published to coincide with Human Rights Day on December 10, the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee’s Approach to Human Rights acknowledges unambiguously that competing athletes, its workforce, the volunteers, spectators and its contractors, as well as the wider the people of the Commonwealth, all have rights and freedoms enshrined in national and international law.

The statement explicitly adds that “The Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee has an obligation – both moral and legal, and with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in mind – to respect, support and promote these rights through the course of its normal business.” The Glasgow 2014 organisers also refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Commonwealth Charter (2013) on human rights and non-discrimination in their statement. As part of their Procurement Sustainability Policy, the games organisers had earlier committed to pay a Living Wage and to require the games’ international suppliers to meet employment standards set out in the International Labour Organizations’ (ILO) Fundamental Conventions. These conventions provide for the elimination of all forms of compulsory or forced labour and the effective abolition of child labour, the protection of union rights and anti-discrimination.

Glasgow’s nod to the UN Guiding Principles is significant. Since we published Striving for Excellence – Mega-Sporting Events and Human Rights last year, the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) has been calling on organisations associated with MSEs - like FIFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), International Paralympic Committee (IPC), and Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF), host governments, local organising committees and delivery authorities, sponsors and contracting companies - to use the Guiding Principles. These principles apply to governments and companies and spell out state duties and company responsibilities to prevent, mitigate and (where necessary) provide access to remedy from human rights abuses.

A recent commentary by Roel Nieuwenkamp and John Ruggie published on this website concluded that Governments have “a responsibility to signal that they expect international sports bodies to respect and adhere to international standards on responsible business conduct” such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the Guiding Principles. The authors suggested that sports governing bodies like FIFA - which bear many of the hallmarks of private companies - can reasonably be considered to be multinational enterprises themselves, and as such should also apply the Guiding Principles.[1] As a first step, the Guiding Principles urge companies to publish a human rights policy statement, like that recently adopted by the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee. They also expect business enterprises to carry out human rights due diligence to avoid causing or contributing to abuses of people’s human rights.

Sports governing bodies have the responsibility to put in place human rights due diligence systems across the MSE life-cycle and throughout their business relationships. And since many local organising committees of MSEs are private companies in their own right, or operate along similar commercial lines, they too face the same human rights expectations. So too do the MSE sponsors, broadcasters, licensees and other commercial partners. This is why the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee has set an important benchmark with its human rights statement. The challenge is for sports governing bodies, host governments and event organising committees in future to pick up the human rights baton from Glasgow. The ‘friendly games’ will be over in two weeks – the medals won, the athletes gone. What next?

The forthcoming MSE hosts include Rio de Janeiro, set to host the 2016 Olympics; Russia, scheduled to welcome the next FIFA World Cup in 2018; the South Korean city of Pyeongchang which will host the 2018 Winter Olympics; Tokyo, now preparing to welcome visitors to the 2020 Summer Olympics; and Qatar, still under the spotlight ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup because of concerns about labour rights.  None of these hosts has so far made any reference to the Guiding Principles or shown evidence of carrying out human rights due diligence. Doing so does not guarantee an abuse-free games, but it may help avoid some of the human rights scandals highlighted over the past year. Rio 2016 Organising Committee is building on lessons on sustainability from London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, with its Sustainable Supply Chain Guide. But at this point it is Oslo - which has just been named by the IOC as one of three candidate cities to host the 2022 Winter Olympics – that has the strongest human rights credentials.

This March the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (Norway’s National Olympic Committee or NOC) signed a formal agreement with four Norwegian trades unions to put human rights at the heart of the 2022 Winter Olympics if Oslo’s bid is successful. On signing the agreement, President of the Norwegian NOC, Mr. Børre Rognlien, said: “We want Olympic and Paralympic Games in Norway, including the Youth Olympic Games in 2016 in Lillehammer, to be remembered as Games that truly respects human rights and labour rights.” In its submission to the IOC's Olympic Agenda 2020 debate, the Norwegian NOC went further, saying that: "Future Games must be characterised by due diligence, transparency and respect for human rights," and urged "the IOC and all future hosts to take universal human rights into account on all aspects of the planning and the delivering Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

As the competitors gather in Glasgow for the start of the Commonwealth Games, there are reports that FIFA is considering giving human rights a higher status within the World Cup bidding process. Olympic Agenda 2020 also looks likely to result in candidate cities for the summer and winter Olympics in the future being expected to focus on what legacies the Games can bring to local people, as well as the area, from the very beginning of the bid procedure, when it is voted on this December. In an open letter to FIFA President Joseph Blatter from Mary Robinson and John Ruggie last month, the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) offered its support to FIFA as it explores ways to integrate human rights considerations fully into its decision-making. We extend the same offer to other sports governing bodies and MSE local organising committees, including the organisers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and Gold Coast, Australia, which will soon take the reigns from Glasgow as host of the 2018 Commonwealth Games.