Japanese NGO Human Rights Now launched a report on Child Labour in the Myanmar Fishing Sector on 17 October in Yangon and held a discussion with around 20 participants from Myanmar and international non-governmental organisations specialized in children’s rights, fishing industry experts and trade unionists. Read more: http://www.myanmar-responsiblebusiness.org/news/child-labour-fishing-sector.html

1. Child Labour and Business Responsibilities
Hnin Wut Yee, Program and Outreach Manager
Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business
17 October 2018
Report Launch Event held by Human Rights Now

2. Outline
• Brief introduction to MCRB
• Business and Human Rights Briefing Paper
• Child Labour in Myanmar
• International export standards
• Recommendations to Companies

3. Founders:
Financial support from governments of:
• UK
• Norway
• Switzerland
• Netherlands
• Ireland
• Denmark (2014-2017)
MCRB aims to provide a trusted and impartial platform for the
creation of knowledge, building of capacity, undertaking of advocacy
and promotion of dialogue amongst businesses, civil society,
governments, experts and other stakeholders with the objective of
encouraging responsible business conduct throughout Myanmar.
စီးပဖ ီးေရီးး အဖြဲ စစညီးမ ီးား ရပညအ္ညး အဖြဲ စစညီး ္ညး စငီးရ အဖြဲ စစညီး
မ ီး း္ ီးးဝ ္ယညမွမးရငေ းစီးပဖ ီးေရီးရပည ယညီးမ ီး်ားင ညရ ပစ ားာ၊ ဗဟ
ဝရရငေစရယညးရစညီးေ္ ညီးား ရစည ေ ဖီးးသမ ္ညမ ီးေစရယညးရစညီးေ္ ညီးာ
စညဦီး စညအ္ည း္ ီး ေ်ားဖီးေ ဖီးစင ငႇ ညီးမႇမ ီး သအစညေပႈရ ေစရယည ္ည သမယညမ
ယင ည ံဝဖ ည ဝ ္ယညမွမႇရငေ းစီးပဖ ီးေရီးးရပည ယညီးမ ီးေပႈးဖယညီးရ ေရီး
ဝဖ္ည မ ီး ၏းမံး္စညမႇ္ငးရရငေ း မ မဝည္ေ း အဖြဲ စစညီး
ဝစညရပညးသအစညေပႈးရ ေစရယညးရစညီးေ္ ညီးးရစညရဖမညအဖြဲစစညီး ြ္ပည စညဲ့ပါသည္။
Responsible business means business conduct that works for the
long-term interests of Myanmar and its people, based on responsible
social and environmental performance within the context of
international standards.
ဝ ္ယညမွမႇရငေ းစီးပဖ ီးေရီးရပည ယညီးး်ားင စညမ စံ ငယညစံ ႇယညီး မ ီး ည္ စ
ဝ ္ယညမွမႇရငေ ရွမႇေရီး ည္း ္ပဝည္ယညီး္ ည်ားငင ညရ ေ်ား ညရဖ္ည ္ည
မ ီး ္ငးေရီးစ ီးးရင္ညယ ္ ည ံီး၍ သမယညမ င ည ံ ည္ ရွး၏ ေရရစညး ္ငကီး
စီးပဖ ီးမ ီး ဝဖ္ည ေ်ား ညရဖ္ညေ စီးပဖ ီးေရီးရပည ယညီး ရပညေ်ား ညမႇမ ီး္ငး
်ားငရငပည စညဲ့ပါသည္။
myanmar.responsible.business
www.mcrb.org.mm
No. 6.A Shin Saw Pu Rd,
Ahlone, Yangon
Tel/Fax: 01 01-512613

4. 4
Businesses must:
Obey the law
Respect human rights, and conduct
human rights due diligence
Businesses can choose to:
Be more sustainable
Create Shared Value
Be more inclusive
Be
philanthropic
Provide
disaster relief
Philanthropy
etc should
also be
responsible,
‘do no harm’
and respect
human rights
The Spectrum of Responsible Business Conduct
(RBC), or Corporate (Social) Responsibility (CSR)
Company activities do not undermine
Myanmar government’s achievement of SDGs
e.g. corruption, pollution, causing conflict
Company activities proactively enhance Myanmar government’s
achievement of SDGs
e.g. job creation, training, promoting better health, inclusion
www.mcrb.org.mm

5. UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
စီးပဖ ီးေရီး ည္ ရွဲ ဖ ည္ ေရီးမ ီး်ားင ညရ ရမညီးစယည ေသ ံမွမ ီး (2011)
Prof. John
Ruggie,
Special
Representati
ve to the
United
Nations
Secretary
General,
2005-2011
1. State duty
to PROTECT
human rights
င ည ံေဝ ည၏
ရွဲ ဖ ည္ ေရီးမ ီး
္ ္ဖမညရယည
ဝ ၀ယည
Policies မွ၀ညဒမ ီး
Law and
Regulation
ဥပေဒ
စစညီးမဥညီးမ ီး
Adjudication
စရ ည ္ည သ ညီး
2. Corporate
responsibility to
RESPECT human rights
စီးပဖ ီးေရီး ရပည ယညီးး္ီးမ ီး၏
ရွဲ ဖ ည္ ေရီးမ ီး
ေရီးစ ီးရင္ညယ ဝ ရယည ဝ ၀ယည
Act with due diligence to avoid
infringement းင င္ညယစညယ မႇမ ီးာ
ဖ ည္ ေရီး ငကီးေအ ္ညမႇ မ ီး္င
ေရ ညး္ဥညရယည ႀ္ငကဝ ည်ားယညီးစစညာ
္ ္ဖမညဝ ီးစီးသ ညီးမ ီးရပညေ်ား
ေ်ား ညရယည
Address impacts
္ညေရ ္ညးင င္ညမႇမ ီး္င
ေသအရ ညီးရယည
3. Access to REMEDY
သပယညရစည ေ္ ညီးမဖယညေ ည
သပကသပ ညသ ညီး/ းင င္ည
ယစညယ မႇမ ီး ီး
္စ ီးသ ညီးမ ီး္င
ရ္ညရမညီးမမႇ
Effective access for victims
းင င္ညယစညယ ြ္ရ ွမ ီး ဝဖ
္ည းငေရ ္ညေ ္စ ီးမႇ္င
ရ္ညရမညီးမမႇ
Judicial and non-judicial
ဝရ ီးဥပေဒာ
ဝရ ီးရံီး ည္်ားင ညေ
ယစညယ ္ညမ ီး ္စ ီး မႇ/
ဝရ ီးရံီးမ ီး ည္မ်ားင ည ြသပ ညပျပင္ပ၌
ယစညယ ္ညမ ီး ္စ ီးမႇ

6. Sector Wide Impact Assessments

7. Briefing papers for Business (in
Burmese and English)
www.mcrb.org.mm
7

8. Children’s Rights and Business in Myanmar
• The Children’s Rights and Business
Principles developed in 2012 by
UNICEF, SAVE, and the UN Global
Compact.
• The CRBP are comprehensive and
address all aspects of the intersection
of children and business, not just child
labour.
• They are based on international law
and standards, including the CRC, ILO
Conventions, and WHO standards.
• The CRBP provide recommendations
to companies on both respecting
children’s rights and supporting them.

10. Child Labour in Myanmar
• Distinction between child labour (economic exploitation,
hazardous work) and working children.
• In Myanmar, no legal minimum age for children outside of
factories and shops/establishments.
• List of hazardous work for children not yet published by
Government.
• Intersection of child labour, informal labour, and trafficking in
Myanmar.
• 10.5% of 5 – 17 year olds are working children (1.3 million
children); 9.3% in child labour (2015 Labour Force Report).

11. Child Labour Continued
• 2018 USG Trafficking in Persons Report downgraded Myanmar to Tier 3;
finding inter alia that boys were trafficked into the fishing industry.
• Child labour throughout the value chain in the inland fisheries sector (ILO
research).
• Forced labour and trafficking of children prevalent in fishing activities (ILO
research).
• Child labour migration: rates of forced labour and trafficking highest
among 15-17 year olds at 34% of all forced labour (UNESCO; IOM).
• Risk of child trafficking into fishing industry in Thailand (Human Rights
Watch January 2018 report on forced labour, case of 16 year old ).

12. International export standards for global
fishing industry
• At least 30 certification schemes and eight key international
agreements relevant to aquaculture certification
• The FAO Technical Guidelines on Aquaculture Certification
approved in 2011, to guide the development, organization and
implementation of credible aquaculture certification schemes.
Among the criteria included, the guidelines state that “child
labour should not be used in a manner inconsistent with ILO
conventions and international standards”.
• UN Global Compact Principle 5, the effective elimination of
child labour.

13. International export standards for global
fishing industry
• GlOBALGAP sets voluntary standards for certification of
aquaculture commodities to address consumer
concerns about food safety, environmental
sustainability, and labour welfare.
• Ethical Standards Initiative addresses working
conditions throughout the supply chain, and was set up
in response to concerns about working conditions of
suppliers, typically from developing countries of goods
produced for export.

14. Recommendations to Companies
• Identify child labour risk; Avoid; Mitigate; and Address child labour.
• Refer to International Standards to establish appropriate age limits in view
of the gaps in the Myanmar Legal Framework
• Establish robust age verification mechanism (medical examination, written
documents, end of compulsory schooling certificate etc.)
• Put in place policy commitment or code
• Policy commitment is known and embedded throughout the company
• Use the growing range of guidance and initiatives for business to address
child labour

15. Recommendations to Companies Continued
• Identify, mitigate and prevent harm to young workers
Example: Remove children from hazardous work
Do not allow children to work with heavy loads or machinery, or perform
work at night.
Reach out to workers under 18; ensure their voices are heard; provide
means for them to register complaints confidentially ( through an operational
grievance mechanism tailored to them).

16. Recommendations to Companies
Continued
 Large companies provides subcontractors and the supply chain
clear guidelines through written contract including company
standards, monitoring procedures (internal audits, third party
audits, or monitoring by trade unions, managers, etc.) ,
consequences of breaching the conditions
 Provide training to prevent, handle upon and remediate
instances of child labour
 Engage with CSOs specialized in child rights
 Take part in collaborative actions by business, employers’
organisations, sectoral bodies, government, international
organisations and CSOs to address the root causes

17. Thank You
Questions and Comments