United Nations guidelines on private business and human rights clearly designate the responsibility for protecting human rights of the employees onto the businesses that employ them. Unfortunately, our national regulations aimed at protecting the rights of workers and defining proper practices for business are not entirely aligned with the above mentioned guidelines and quite often fail to address current issues. The economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic further exposed these misalignments and the lack of proper tools for dialogue in search for appropriate solutions.
Our answer to the problem was a creation of a new model for civic dialogue we entitled #deliberateria. The model is designed to involve citizens in a debate over issues they deem important and help make decisions following democratic practices. We have tested the model during pilot consultations in three cities: Poznań, Częstochowa, and Przemyśl. During the consultations, individuals involved in work with advisory and assessment bodies tackled difficult questions relating to respecting human rights by businesses and worked on recommendations for the Polish government.
These recommendations, as well as results of an online survey (with an estimated reach via informational campaign of 3000,000 individuals) have been included in our guidelines for the 2nd Business and Human Rights National Plan. We have designed those recommendations together with partner organizations from the CSR Watch Polska. We published a report on the status of United Nations guidelines and their implementation efforts in Poland.
Our experiences gathered over the course of the project have been collected in our e-publication dedicated to #deliberateria. It’s a one-of-a-kind manual on creating dialogue using this method, addressed to everyone interested in the state of public discourse and its quality in Poland.
When starting on the project, we were inspired by the Icelandic constitutional process from 2008. That’s why for our partners we chose experts from the University of Iceland who were directly involved in that work back in 2008. We have organized an international conference where we discussed methods and the importance of deliberative democracy and public dialogue, as well as a seminar on youth participation, addressed to professionals working with young people in Poland, teaching them how to engage the youth, and about different ways of civic participation.