Barcelona
16th and 17th November 2022
Hybrid Format
Welcome to the fifth conference organised by the Group for Socially Responsible Public Procurement (GCPSR) in Catalonia. The GCPSR is made up of various public institutions, universities and civil society organisations that promote Global Justice and the respect for Human Rights in the supply chain of goods and services acquired by the public sector and administrations.
The public sector has an obligation to respect and uphold Human Rights, and this includes the extraterritorial responsibility for the life cycle of the products it purchases. Mainly, as it is in the initial stages of these supply chains (extraction of raw materials, production, manufacturing) where most of the violations of rights (labour, social and environmental) occur in the Global South.
Thus, this 2022 calls for collective thinking and decisive steps towards a more sustainable model, and a courageous commitment to incorporate measures to tackle the climate emergency. The administrations and organisations of the GCPSR are promoting synergies that contribute to an effective model to ensure a real coherence of public policies in local and global agendas, with the intention of guaranteeing the future of humanity and of the planet.
Following the transposition of Directives 24 and 25 of 2014 to the Member States, public procurement took an important step forward. Several universities, municipalities, and national and international public administrations have already started promoting a model based on strategic public procurement and incorporating a gender perspective, environmental sustainability criteria, and social and labour improvements. However, this coherence remains a challenge, especially in the complex supply chains between the global South and North. The demand for policy coherence has yet to be extended beyond the EU’s borders.
Initiatives are being promoted along these lines, such as the development of national and international regulatory frameworks to demand that EU companies comply with due diligence in Human Rights and sustainability.
In this context, the 5th Conference on Socially Responsible Public Procurement aims to reflect and make proposals on these key challenges and on current and future regulations, to achieve the coherence of public policies.
The State can contract out the supply of goods and services, but it cannot contract out its Human Rights obligations
The Danish Institute for Human Rights (2020). Driving the change through public procurement
