3 April 2023. WBI Executive Director Dr Bonny Ling returns to the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University as Visiting Assistant Professor to lead a graduate course on Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights in Supply Chains alongside Prof Chiu Yu-Fan (邱羽凡教授) to build capacity for business and human rights in Taiwan.
Back in December 2022, Executive Director Dr Bonny Ling delivered a talk on “Corporate Accountability in Supply Chain Management and Forced Labor” before the roll out of Work Better Innovations’ education and training project on International Labour Organization’s forced labour indicators for Taiwanese SMEs.
[Dr Bonny Ling speaks to Taiwanese SMEs on forced labour in December 2022.]
Fast forward to 2023, and she is back teaching a semester-long graduate course (online) on Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights in Supply Chains to the next generation of university students, practitioners and civil society activists. The course started in February and will conclude in May 2023.
In anticipation of starting her new position, Dr Ling said previously, “It is important to build human capacity on business and human rights, on human rights due diligence, on the S in #ESG.” The topics covered by the course include:
- Corporate responsibility to respect human rights
- UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’s “Respect, Protect and Remedy Framework”
- Supply chain and ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work
- Corporate responsibility and Access to Remedy
- Resource exploitation and forced labour
- Elimination of forced labour: Gaps between international standards and Taiwan
- Human rights due diligence: Developments in Europe and Asia
- Sustainability and corporate responsibility
- Sports and human rights
- Conflict minerals and responsible technology value chain
- Multistakeholder engagement
A powerful and effective way of building human capacity on business and human rights is through education – learning the importance of human rights due diligence within the corporate sector, what supply-chain mapping is, and how to best account for the social impact of businesses. This is exactly what Work better Innovations set out to do in 2022, when we launched our Practical Guide on Forced Labour Indicators for Taiwan-based SMEs.
We look forward to building on this work for 2023!
