Working Group On SR Looks to Australia
22 June 2006 at 1:06 pm
The International Standards Organisation Working Group on Social Responsibility will look to Australia early in 2007 in its bid to build international consensus on a voluntary SR system.
The recent ISO meeting in Portugal has made further progress developing the future ISO 26000 standard on social responsibility.
Some 320 people from 55 countries and 26 international organizations attended the third plenary meeting of the ISO Working Group on Social Responsibility in Lisbon, Portugal.
ISO 26000 is intended for use by organizations of all types, in both public and private sectors, in developed and developing countries. ISO 26000 will contain guidelines, not requirements and is now expected to be published in the first quarter of 2009.
Drafting of the content of the standard is in progress and at Lisbon, one of the main tasks was to review some 2 100 comments from member groups on the first working draft. This work will continue in order to produce a second working draft for circulation and comment before the next meeting in Sydney in January or February 2007.
ISO 26000 is being developed by representatives of the six main stakeholder groups: industry; government: labour; consumers; nongovernmental organizations; and service, support, research and others.
The ISO says the guidance in ISO 26000 will draw on best practices developed by existing public and private sector SR initiatives.
The ISO says the working group continues to develop communication tools for promoting SR awareness throughout the world, the significance of the ISO standard, and how diverse interests may most effectively contribute to the shaping of the ISO 26000 standard and to other social responsibility activities.
Communication tools include a dedicated Web site www.iso.org/sr with an abundance of material on ISO’s SR initiative.
