The National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) hosted the 1st Human Rights Management Forum on May 23 2013 at its building in cooperation with the UN Global Compact Network Korea and the Business Institute for Sustainable Development of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The forum approached a series of the latest industrial accidents involving hazardous substances from a human rights perspective and sought ways to prevent such accidents and increase corporate awareness of human rights.
At the first session, Professor Lee Sang-soon of the Sogang University introduced “the Human Rights Management Guideline and Checklist.” The Guideline contains basic principles that businesses must consider when introducing and implementing human rights management, while the Checklist was developed to help companies identify their human rights situation so that they can accurately understand and respond to human rights risks facing them.
The second session was a discussion on how to prevent industrial accidents involving chemical materials. Mr. Lee Choong-ho, Director of the Industrial Accident Prevention Team of the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency shared a statistics on chemical accidents that have occurred recently in Korea and his insights on how to respond to them. Panelists from different fields of civil society, the labor community and scholars had an in-depth discussion on the subject.
The NHRCK will make the best use of profound insights gathered at this forum for its future policy recommendations and continue to host meetings on the topic of human rights management.
