The Business of Human Rights

Just a quick reminder that WVU is hosting a business and human rights conference on September 23rd and 24th. It’s shaping up to be a great conference. We have many submissions from scholars and practitioners, both nationally and internationally. I am also pleased to report that Michael Addo, a member of the UN’s Working Group on Business and Human Rights, has agreed to participate.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to submit an abstract. Details of the call for papers can be found here. The deadline is tomorrow.

As more details of the conference emerge, I will be sure to post them here. Stay tuned.

I’m taking a break from blogging for the next week or so. I’ll be on a study abroad trip with my students, and based on past experience, it will be pretty hard to blog on a boat. However, never fear, the blog will be back for its weekly review the week of May 27th.

I spend a lot of time on this blog looking at corporate responsibility for minimizing human rights impacts within their spheres. It is my primary area of focus within my scholarship and the area that I feel where we have the greatest ability to impact change.

However, I was reminded that there are two other very important pillars in the three pillar Protect, Respect and Remedy framework (the foundational document for the subsequent Guiding Principles).

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop hosted by the U.S. Department of State in conjunction with Harvard Law School’s Pension Project Workshop. The workshop was entitledPromoting Labor and Human Rights Through Investment. As the name would suggest, there was a lot of discussion regarding what role institutional investors can and should have in promoting human rights issues within corporations.

The conference was fascinating – it felt like I learned a seminar’s worth of material in seven hours. There were many themes that emerged throughout the day – too many to put all in one post. But, one thing that struck me as a I looked around the room was – despite the many issues that the United States has in struggling with this issue – I have reason to remain hopeful; of the more than fifty participants who were involved in the workshop during the day, almost half of them were from the federal government. Representatives from the Department of State and the Department of Labor were there to take part in a conversation that, in order to be successful needs to take place on all levels of government.

One of the things that I have noticed in my burgeoning career as a scholar in this area, is a general lack of language here in the United States that discusses BHR issues with human rights language, even when they clearly implicate international norms and human rights treaties.

However, there are always exceptions.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (like here) we have a tendency in the United States to look at human rights as other countries’ problems. When we do think of issues related to BHR we tend to examine them within smaller, statute-based lenses (such as worker’s rights, employment rights, safety issues). The problem with using these terms as our only focus is that it takes away from the premise that many of these same issues implicate a fundamental human right (ones held by folks here just as much as abroad).

Finally that message is coming home. Literally.