Think tank activities
The foundation conducts think tank activities on a range of corporate responsibility topics. It has a long history of academic and political engagement in the field of corporate ethics and social responsibility and is therefore a recognized contributor to the debate, for example in the following initiatives:
Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights
Through the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, Novartis is a founding member of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights (BLIHR), a program initiated in 2003 to help lead and develop a corporate response to human rights. Within BLIHR, Novartis has concentrated efforts specifically on management tools and online human rights analysis and training, as well as wider engagement on sphere of influence issues facing the pharmaceutical sector.
Learn more on the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights (BLIHR)
Further development of the UN Global Compact
Novartis was one of the first companies to sign the Global Compact launched by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000. The foundation supports these efforts internally and goes beyond this to argue in favor of a further development of the UN Global Compact initiative - while 4 500 signatory companies may well require greater organization and professionalism, the spirit of innovative pragmatism must remain intact. In 2005-2006, Professor Klaus Leisinger, president and CEO of the Novartis Foundation, also acted as Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General for the Global Compact.
Learn more on the UN Global Compact website
Promoting practical instruments in the context of "Business and Human Rights"
Since 2006, the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development has been collaborating with the Danish Institute for Human Rights to develop a Human Rights Compliance Assessment tool adapted to the pharmaceutical industry. This web-based tool benchmarks business human rights compliance against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and over 80 other major treaties and International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions. So far, Novartis has piloted the tool in its operations in Turkey, Taiwan, and South Africa. The next country to apply the tool is expected to be China in 2009. Click here to learn more about the project.
Visit the Danish Institute for Human rights website
Read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Learn more about the project
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