I spent some time last week reading the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable’s new report on using U.S. securities laws to affect business and human rights issues. The Report, entitled,“Knowing and Showing,” Using U.S. Securities Laws to Compel Human Rights Disclosure, provides a pretty compelling case for adding human rights impacts to the issues that need to be disclosed by publicly traded companies.
Given the rule-making that the SEC has undertaken recently (around conflict minerals and climate change for instance) the agency already seems to be heading in that direction. It seems that the smart money would be for companies to get ahead of the regulatory curve by allowing their human rights risk assessments to be recorded as part of their disclosure efforts. The Report, which was written by ICAR, was “reviewed, edited and endorsed” by Professor Cynthia Williams of Osgoode Hall Law School, a pioneering scholar on issues that intersect within securities regulation and human rights.
Click here for a copy of the report.Click here and here for previous posts that discuss the SEC’s efforts in the business and human rights arena.
ICAR logo taken from http://accountabilityroundtable.org/
Photo of Prof. Williams taken from http://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty/williams-cynthia
