Reading through the Ruggie Principles, three things jump out at me:
1. We can't limit this to ICANN's policies and implementation; adherence to the Ruggie Principles clearly requires ICANN to make that commitment as a "business enterprise," which extends at least to ICANN as an employer, as a contracting party and as a provider of services).
2. The relationship between an ICANN commitment to Human Rights and the operations and output of the various ICANN structures (GNSO, SGs, Constituencies, ccNSO, ASO, GAC, RSSAC, SSAC, ALAC and RALOs) is unclear. To the extent these are Bylaws-created structures, it seems much more likely than not that the obligations created by the commitment would fall equally on each of the structures, and not just on "ICANN-the-corporation."
3. The foundational documents that define the proposed ICANN Human Rights commitment include at least these six: the UDHR, the two related International Covenants, the Ruggie Principles, the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and the ICT Sector Guide.
4. Adherence to the Ruggie Principles requires a significant operational commitment (see Principles 15-24).
5. The Ruggie Principles don't fit ICANN as a policy and implementation body nearly as easily as they fit ICANN as a business enterprise.
We can't wait to Workstream 2 to address these points. We don't have to write tomes (at least not in WS1), but we at least need to provide clarity on these and other defining aspects, and define and conduct a "stress test" analysis. (Putting bylaws adoption in WS1 and Stress Tests in WS2 seems to be a particularly untenable position, and counter to our basic working methods as a WG.)
This doesn't need to delay us, but it does mean that we need to do a whole lot more before Dublin besides setting a time to meet.
Greg
P.S. A more detailed discussion on some of the above points follows. The above is my attempt to be more pithy.
The UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (Ruggie Principles) are founded on the "International Bill of Human Rights," which consists of the UDHR plus "the main instruments through
which it has been codified: the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights," and "the principles concerning fundamental rights in the
eight ILO core conventions as set out in the Declaration on Fundamental
Principles and Rights at Work." According to the Ruggie Principles, "These are the benchmarks against which
other social actors assess the human rights impacts of business enterprises."
Niels ten Oever also included the "ICT Sector Guide on Implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights" on our list. (Niels's list also included the Ruggie Principles, UDHR and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but oddly not the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.)
It seems clear to me that if the Ruggie Principles are going to be one of the definitive documents for defining ICANN's commitment to Human Rights, it needs to make that commitment as a business enterprise and not merely as a policy-making enterprise. The commitment thus extends to ICANN as an employer and contractor, and to all the services ICANN provides, not merely policy development and implementation. (It would be rather an odd statement for ICANN as a "business enterprise" to exempt its own operations.)
Reading the Ruggie Principles, it strikes me that ICANN as a governance ecosystem and policy-making enterprise is a somewhat awkward fit, compared to ICANN as a "normal" business enterprise.
It also raises the interesting question of how an ICANN commitment to Human Rights would affect the operations of bodies created directly or indirectly by ICANN, such as the GNSO and its Stakeholder Groups and Constituencies, the ccNSO, the ASO, the GAC, the RSSAC and SSAC, and the ALAC and the various RALOs.
The Ruggie Principles also require significant work on the part of a compliant business enterprise, including:
(a) A policy commitment to meet their responsibility to respect human
rights;
(b) A human rights due diligence process to identify, prevent, mitigate
and account for how they address their impacts on human rights;
(c) Processes to enable the remediation of any adverse human rights
impacts they cause or to which they contribute.
This is Principle 15; Principles 16-24 flesh out how these policies and processes would be implemented in a generic business enterprise (again, applying this to the ICANN structures and ecosystem raises a number of significant questions).