On March 19th, the Centre for Human Rights, Multiculturalism and Migration (CHRM2) partnered with Pluralism and Asian Legal Studies (PALS), a centre under Faculty of Law University of Jember. Together, the two centres co-organised a seminar on Corporate Due Diligent and Complicity with Dr. Stefanus Mere at the University’s Faculty of Law. Dr. Stefan is a lecturer and researcher at Nanzan University in Japan.
Dr. Stefan explained the importance of due diligence and complicity principles for big corporations when conducting business. The two principles consist of mechanisms that require corporation to respect human rights especially for people living around their business as well as people working with them. Even though these principles are not legally binding, the corporation must comply with them to respect human rights and do fair trade business. In many developed countries, such as Western Europe and Northern America, some people already know how the “dirty business and sweating factories” treat their employees. People usually protest these practices by boycotting products. For example, the USA Caterpillar Company, which produces heavy machineries, was boycotted by most human rights organisations because the company sold bulldozers to Israel and killed Rachel Corrie, a US human rights citizen protesting the destruction of a house in Palestine area.
CHRM2 and PALS expect that all students who attended the seminar will now have the initiative to work on human rights activism locally in Jember. For example, University students are expected to be good customers and be aware of the products that meet human rights standard during production.