For more than two decades, Human Rights Watch has documented human rights abuses in the context of global supply chains. We have documented hazardous child labor in tobacco farming in the United States and Indonesia. Earlier this year we exposed human rights and environmental abuses in the supply chains of jewelry companies, including forceful displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands and pollution of waterways and soils with toxic chemicals. Under the UN Guiding Principles, companies should ensure that their business activities, including throughout their supply chains, do not cause, benefit from, support, or engender human rights abuses. Despite the importance of the UN Guiding Principles in articulating corporate responsibilities, they are not a panacea. Critically, they lack any mechanism to ensure compliance or to measure implementation. This flaw of the Guiding Principles underlines the importance of the efforts currently underway at the Human Rights Council toward a binding international treaty on business enterprises and human rights that can help secure human rights accountability. What’s clear is that the UN Guiding Principles set an important benchmark for the expectations of society on the conduct of corporations with respect to human rights. Many of the standards in the Guiding Principles, although nonbinding, are based on international human rights instruments. It is therefore incumbent upon national human rights monitoring mechanisms, such as the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, to ensure that the corporate responsibility to respect human rights is upheld. The role and importance of human rights monitoring mechanisms, especially in cases involving emerging issues of international law, such as those raised by environmental threats, takes me to the second question. II. The Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion on Human Rights and the Environment The second question for me today concerns the Advisory Opinion on Human Rights and the Environment, published by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in February. This opinion is highly significant for the case here, because it addresses both the extraterritorial dimensions of international human rights law and the human right to a healthy environment. It bears recalling that the Inter-American Court, in addition to hearing cases of violations of the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the American Convention on Human Rights, can also provide opinions in response to questions presented by any member state of the Organization of American States. Advisory opinions by the Inter-American Court are legally relevant to all member states of the Organization of American States. This includes the United States, where several of the carbon majors are domiciled. II.i. Factual Background of the Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion Marcos Orellana – Remarks for Philippines CHR 23 & 24 May Hearing 3