Page 300 - วารสารกฎหมาย ศาลอุทธรณ์คดีชํานัญพิเศษ

วารสารกฎหมาย ศาลอุทธรณ์คดีชำานัญพิเศษ

3. Machineries to Make Soft Law Harder

(1) Reporting
Reporting is the basic and primary means of ensuring better compliance with

norms. The ILO’s historical success in its supervisory activities would not have been
achieved if Articles 19 and 22 of the Constitution had not existed. A “constructivist”
development had taken place to eventually set up a sophisticated mechanism of

supervision. Thus, the supervision of the application of ILS (though both legally binding
Conventions and not-totally binding Recommendations) materialized by subsequent
practices of the Organization. The Constitution only obliges governments to supply

reports regularly to the ILO, answering the questions put by the Governing Body in its
report forms. The Constitution was silent about what the ILO does after receiving the

reports. Actually what happened in the earlier days of the ILO was that the secretariat
provided a summary of those governmental reports and forwarded them to the conference
committee, which in turn acknowledged receipt of the reports. That was it, and nothing

else happened. When the number of ratifications grew in the first years of the 1920s,
the Governing Body decided to set up a body to carefully examine the reports and make

comments as to whether the ratified Conventions were satisfactorily applied. The
Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations
(CEACR) had no constitutional basis for its creation. It was an invention by the

Governing Body and its mandate gradually expanded as a matter of practice. C. Wilfred
Jenks referred to this development as “a cautious but a bold approach”. 13

A similar development is taking place in the contemporary world of business.
Enterprises declare certain goals in their websites or annual reports submitted at
shareholder meetings. Their goals usually contain a number of labour-related principles,

such as forced labour, trade union rights or equality in employment. Those principles
14
are, in my opinion, effectively labour-related CSR codes. Then the reporting comes into

operation: In the majority of large-scale businesses, it has become a rule to include a

13 C.W. Jenks. Social Justice in the Law of Nations – The ILO Impact after Fifty Years, (Oxford UP 1970) 42.
14 Puma Corporation: https://about.puma.com/en/sustainability/social (visited 21 Jul 2019).

298