Refining the Rules of the Game: The Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights

Justine Nolan

doi:10.5334/ujiel.ca

Abstract

The growth of transnational corporations over the past few decades has been paralleled by concerns to find ways of regulating the deleterious impacts on human rights by the ever-increasing number of companies whose corporate tentacles stretch across national boundaries and beyond the reach of traditional corporate control mechanisms. The steady evolution of a global social expectation that companies should respect international human rights standards, combined with the occasional foray by states in adopting an expansive approach to protecting rights, is changing the nature and possibility of developing a firmer basis for corporate accountability for human rights. What we are witnessing is a process of re-regulation whereby state and non-state actors are utilizing a combination of public and private regulation to improve the framework for corporate rights compliance. The regulation of corporate activity with respect to human rights requires a multiplicity of stakeholders and a very nuanced mix of public and private regulation that may be difficult to replicate easily across different sectors, states and cultural boundaries.

Highlights

There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.1Milton Friedman’s well known and oft quoted statement regarding corporate social responsibility is commonly interpreted as implying that companies do not possess any social responsibilities but rather should focus on increasing profits
The Guiding Principles appear to be the latest in a long line of soft regulatory techniques that rely in a large part on private regulation that encourages, but does not necessarily require, a corporation to comply with human rights. 10. This paper examines this process of ‘re-regulation’ in the business and human rights context
More recently ASEAN as a whole has started to open its doors to embracing the concept of corporate social responsibility, even though particular states in this region have a history of reluctance in discussing human rights

Summary

Introduction

There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.. The development and implementation of private regulatory methods that do not rely on the role of the state as the ‘human rights protector’ include the incremental but widespread adoption of codes, guidelines and principles – both at the micro and macro level – which are being used as mechanisms to drive corporate compliance with international human rights standards.13 Such developments have, and continue to, urge a change in corporate culture that recognises workers, wherever they are located, must be treated with dignity and respect. In May 2013, a group of predominantly European apparel companies developed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, quickly followed in June by the establishment of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, made up of North American retailers including Walmart and Gap.22 These two initiatives, demonstrate ‘regulatory renaissance’ at work, by both recognizing the limited governmental capacity to provide a short-term remedy to prevent further disasters and accepting that corporate social responsibilities extend beyond those that can be defined in stark legal terms.

From Principles to Practice

Blending Public and Private Regulation

Conclusion