Operationalising Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights in Taiwan: Current State and Challenges 落實企業尊重人權之責任: 台灣現況與挑戰

This policy brief, “Operationalising Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights in Taiwan: Current State and Challenges,” provides an assessment among a study group of Taiwanese businesses on the current state of implementation of this corporate responsibility under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

The UNGPs is a globally agreed standard to prevent and address risks of negative human rights impacts in a business context. This brief addresses UNGPs’ second pillar, corporate responsibility to respect human rights. It examines how widely Taiwanese business enterprises accept their corporate responsibility under this pillar.

The research, authored by Wen-chi Chang and Dr. Bonny Ling, is the first study by the Taiwan Project for Business and Human Rights, a special collaboration between WBI and Professor Yu-Fan Chiu, from the leading School of Law, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.

We found the current state-of-play of adherence to UNGP Pillar II in Taiwan provides early encouraging results among our study group:

• The majority of enterprises we studied have publicly disclosed their commitments to human rights.
• Nearly half have issued human rights due diligence policies.
• All the enterprises without a dedicated and publicly disclosed policy on human rights due diligence had a form of ESG risk management and reporting.

Corporate responsibility to respect human rights among our study group tended to scale down with the size of the enterprise operation and also that remediation needs stronger uptake by enterprises, mirroring developments abroad. We observed more alignment with the UNGPs among the large-scale enterprises.

This research was conducted in Chinese. The primary materials we gathered for the analysis are listed in the table below.

* * * 

這份摘要《落實企業尊重人權之責任：台灣現況與挑戰》以數間台灣企業作為研究樣本，對其履行《聯合國商業與人權指導原則》（UNGPs）框架下企業尊重人權責任的現況進行分析。

UNGPs 是一項全球公認的標準，旨在防止和解決商業環境中負面人權影響的風險。這份政策摘要探討 UNGPs 第二支柱——企業尊重人權的責任，並評估台灣企業的實施現況。

這份摘要的作者為張文祈與凌怡華博士，並在國立陽明交通大學科技法律學院著名的邱羽凡教授的協助下，也是台灣企業人權方案的首份報告。

這份摘要探討台灣工商企業在其公司政策和流程中，如何履行其尊重人權的企業責任；並進一步發現在 UNGP 框架下，台灣對於第二支柱的落實現狀呈現令人鼓舞的初步成果：

• 研究樣本中的多數企業均已公開揭露其人權承諾。

• 將近一半的企業已發佈人權盡職調查政策。

• 所有沒有專門且公開揭露人權盡職調查政策的企業，均已執行某種形式的 ESG 風險管理且已提出報告。

我們進一步發現，研究樣本中的企業對於尊重人權責任的落實往往隨著企業規模縮減而降低，且救濟措施需要企業更廣泛、積極的接受程度，這與國外的發展情況相似。我們也觀察到大型企業更能符合 UNGP 框架下的國際期待。

本研究以中文進行，以下列出了我們收集並用以分析的主要資料。