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Ramón Jáuregui, a member of the European Parliament, offered Friday a presentation entitled 'The social responsibility of companies before Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDO)', which is part of the ODSesiones project, in which the University of Murcia will dedicate one month to each ODS until April 2021.

In his speech, the MEP stressed that, in a world of changes in which inequality grows and there is a widespread social discontent, companies can not be alien to these realities, especially taking into account their great capacity for impact.

An ability to impact and a power that can be exemplified by taking into account that "the market value of the ten largest companies in the world is greater than the GDP of the 180 smallest countries in the world," he explained.

For Jáuregui, the involvement of companies in the progress of humanity and societies is a long way in which he has been preaching for twenty years, since "it is not a matter of complying with the law or paying their taxes, but of something else" .

It is about "companies acquiring a commitment to their environment, with its impacts and, thus, contribute to creating a better and more sustainable society".

In his opinion and taking stock of these years, he considers that the expected development has not been achieved and that there has been some conceptual confusion between the concepts of social responsibility and social action.

In his opinion, most companies end up doing social actions as a marketing strategy, but he believes that this is not enough if it is not linked to a policy of full social responsibility.

The MEP has expressed that, in the globalized world in which we live and where millions of companies operate, a universal law is needed that serves to protect labor dignity and workers' rights, something that the United Nations has been working on since four years.

In this line, it is intended to install an extraterritorial justice, which allows that "the violation of Human Rights is not required before the country where it is produced, but before the country where the company that has violated them is located", since in many cases "in the country where the violation occurs there is no legal security".

To conclude, Jáuregui has expressed that "when justice coincides with what is necessary, society advances";

an idea that has to move the connection between companies and social responsibility.

Source: Universidad de Murcia