Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Consortium Meets Again

The 6th conference of the Extraterritorial (ETO) Consortium took place as a special event of the Vienna+20 Action Week on Human Rights in Vienna, on 25 and 26 June 2013. This parallel event was made possible by the presence of a large portion of ETO Consortium members actively participating in the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights. They marked the emergence of ETOs as among the advances of the human rights community since 1993.

The conference took place in two parts: an internal meeting on 25 June and a public meeting on 26 June, both at the House of the EU.

The first session discussed an input paper of the ETO Steering Committee reflecting on progress and recommending changes.

This input paper triggered discussion at the internal part of the 6th ETO Consortium Conference. It reported progress and enthusiasm over the new ETO Consortium website and logo, and the constructive regional and global conferences (Lima, Banjul, Kathmandu, Vienna+20) over the past year. The paper reported that joint agendas in the Focal Groups turned out to be too ambitious for the first year, and resources to support the Focal Groups work are not sufficient. The Steering Committee also reported that the ETO Secretariat(currently hosted at FIAN) in developing, including the start of trainees and new interns staffing the secretariat after August 2013.

The ETOC has an Election Committee of two (an academic and a CSO representative), managing elections to the Steering Committee. The conference unanimously approved Lilian Chenwi (Wits University, South Africa) and Ute Hausmann (FIAN Germany) as the new Election Commission.

Unfortunately, no regional representative from MENA has been elected to the Steering Committee so far, because the region’s organizations working on ETOs have not formally applied for membership. (HIC-MENA has operated within the ETO Consortium and has taken responsibility for cases in MENA, but the ETO Consortium treats it as an international partner, because HIC is joined also by representatives from other regions.)

The participants discussed an invitation for the ETO Consortium to hold its 7th conference jointly with Glothro’s final conference in Turku on 27–29 March 2014. The assembly advised the Steering Committee to consult with members to find parties outside Europe and the global North that might host the 7th ETO Consortium conference. One of the proposals was to explore the possibilities of hosting the next conference in Cairo, or another venue in MENA, to help develop the membership, specific ETO cases and exposure to the concepts there.

In the public conference, Thorsten Göbel of Brot für die Welt welcomed the participants and introduced the purpose of this second part of the 6th ETO Conference. Ana Maria Suarez Franco (FIAN) introduced the recent history of ETOs and traced back when and why the ETO Consortium was founded. Niko Lusiani (CESR) talked about the relevance of ETOs for the governance of finance and taxation of international transfers, EU Troika imposing austerity measures on certain European countries, credit-rating agencies and accounting firms and the coresponsibilities of public and private creditors, and the ETOs of IMF member states in this context. Brid Brennan (TNI) pointed to the importance of the ETO to protect in order to holding TNCs to account. Bret Thiele (Global Initiative for ESCR) explained how the Maastricht Principles apply to IFIs and their respective Member States. He mentioned how the work of the ETO Focal Group on Development and IFIs aimed at getting UN mechanisms and special procedures to clearly articulate that IFIs and their respective Member States have ETOs. Flavio Valente (FIAN) in his short intervention mentioned the many paragraphs of the Vienna+20 CSO Declaration referred to ETOs.

Sandra Ratjen (ICJ) spoke about the relevance of the Declaration’s parts on accountability, remedy and primacy of ETOs, not least in the field of trade/investment. Accountability und remedy remain the subject of ultimate concerns and efforts to apply ETOs in the current Human Rights System, as well envisioning how new mechanisms such as the post-2015 “Sustainable Development Goals” and the World Court on Human Rights proposed by the Vienna+20 CSO conference and declaration.

In the ensuing discussion, the audience underlined the need for promotional material on ETOs and the Maastricht Principles in a simpler format and for social movements. Strategically, the participants prioritized an end to impunity of various governmental and non-state actors, where a World Court on Human Rights could serve remedy. HIC-HLRN coordinator Joseph Schechla projected another long-term objective of the ETO Consortium’s work in reforming the conduct of foreign policies in line with states’ human rights obligations.