UN지구협약의 특징과 가능성: soft Law vs. hard Law = The features and potentials of United Nations Global Compact: soft Law vs. hard Law

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

10 years have passed since the United Nations Global Compact(UNGC) was launched. With the disputes concerning the effectiveness of UNGC in mind, this article tries to show the main features and the potentials of UNGC. The most conspicuous feature of UNGC is that it is based on the principle of voluntarism. While the participants are required to openly announce their support of the 10 principles of UNGC and to communicate annual report on their progresses in respect of corporate social responsibility(CSR) activities, we still can safely say that UNGC is a voluntary initiative because the participation is not mandatory and the report is not substantially reviewed or controlled by UNGC office. Widely discussed is whether such a voluntarism is appropriate for UN to adapt to promote CSR activities in the globalized world. Some are underestimating UNGC, saying that it is only to blue wash transnational corporations that are suffering from crisis regarding their reputation. Others, while admitting that valuntarism is not enough, are supportive to UNGC, saying that it is useful because it paves the way to hard laws which will enforce TNCs to abide by social responsibilities. Both the approaches are common in that they believe only in hard law. This article looks into UNGC in a different perspective, using the notion of soft law, which is defined in this article as norm made through voluntary agreements among the subjects without official legislative authority. Recently, the understanding of soft law in this way is growing rapidly, especially in the field of CSR, for it has its own characteristics and potentials which can not be found in hard law. Soft law can be context-specific and flexible and, if well-designed, be more effective than hard law. If these characteristics of soft law are recognized, it is not proper to criticize the approach of UNGC only for the reason that it adopted voluntarism. Instead it is necessary to evaluate the achievements and potentials of UNGC from the perspective of soft law. One of the proposals submitted in the article is that UNGC needs to stop trying to promote the CSR activities of all the entities, which means that it would be better to focus its resources on the CSR of TNCs. In addition it is important to form a social environment to encourage TNCs to move toward CSR activities voluntarily and competitively, using, for example, hard laws such as international treaties or national laws.

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