I am thrilled to announce that WVU’s business and human rights conference has received an official letter of support from the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights. We are honored and humbled by the recognition and we hope that it will encourage broad participation from all constituents.
Next week’s blog will (I hope) mark the opening of the registration, provide a list of attendees and list a draft agenda.
In 2002, almost ten years before the U.N. approved of the Guiding Principles, Beth Stephens, a Professor of Law at Rutgers-Camden, penned an essay that is extremely beneficial in providing a framework for holding TNC’s accountable and understanding their motivation. In her essay, The Amorality of Profit: Transnational Corporations and Human Rights, Stephens does a nice job of establishing that corporations’ violation of human rights is not just a recent development. By looking at the role corporations have played in previous atrocities, such as the Holocaust, Stephens establishes the importance of providing remedies in a timely fashion. According to Stephens, if a remedy is not provided immediately, it is easy to lose site of the impact the initial violation had on humanity. For example, it is hard to grasp the impact that corporations had on the holocaust because so much time has elapsed. It is known that corporations provided equipment to help Nazi Germany monitor citizens, in addition to providing drugs, which were used in the experimentation on human lives. Further, there were banking corporations, which profited from the accounts that went unclaimed. By looking at one example, it is easy to see how difficult it would be to fully grasp the impact corporations can have on human rights.
Businesses are made to increase profits. When decisions are made regarding businesses, the sole goal is to maximize profit with little regard to the effect that might have on human rights or the environment. Justification for this maximizing profits approach can be found in Safire’s claims that “the primary social responsibilities of a corporation are to serve its owners by returning a profit and its community by paying taxes; to earn the allegiance of customers by delivering value, and to provide a secure future for employees who help it succeed in the marketplace.”
Stephens goes on to reiterate that many corporations have grown to a level of economic power, which often supersedes that of most nation-states. With the vast power, corporations often chose to set up shop in locations where governments are not strong enough to monitor the corporate actions.
In short, this article a prescient look at many of the issues that would dominate the business and human rights agenda now and in years to come. I would highly suggest that folks interested in the subject take some time to review it. The article can be found here.
There’s been a few major developments with government entities in the mining sector in the past few weeks.
In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission released guidance regarding its position on conflict mineral disclosures under the Dodd-Frank Act.
The FAQs for that are available here.
On Wednesday, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed to sign on the G8 initiative that is “aimed at improving corporate transparency and cracking down on international corruption in the mining and oil and gas sectors.” The new reporting requirements will seek to bring Canada more in line with other G8 countries.
Our study abroad program returned from Brazil on Wednesday. The three-week program was a success. As usual, I also learned a tremendous amount. For instance, one of things I learned on this trip was that Brazil has recently implemented the “Brazil without Misery Plan.” The plan is designed to reduce poverty and increase opportunity for the extreme poor in Brazil. You can find out more information about the plan here. There’s a lot I could say about the plan but I’m still recovering from the strains of international travel. Suffice it to say that a plan like this can go a long way to satisfying a State’s duty to Protect under the Respect Framework. It’s something I’d like to explore more in my scholarship.
The students and faculty from UVV and WVU pose together as they kick off the colloquy.
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.
