We focus on social impact integrity in corporate supply chains, but what about corporate 'responsibility' for the downstream end-use made of a product or service?
I use the term 'responsibility' very broadly -- mostly in relation to 'liability' in the court of public / consumer / market opinion, rather than in any legal sense.
One manifestation of the shifting expectations of business in society is that some brand-conscious firms are paying far more attention to the use to which their products are put, in human rights impact terms. This is in addition to the more familiar concept of the attention to the human rights footprint of the 'upstream' supply chain through which they source components and ingredients for their products.
The sensitivities on this issue vary greatly by sector and firm and context -- this is true of corporate human rights impact generally.
One sector of interest is the pharmaceutical sector in relation to the supply of drugs capable of being used in state-administered lethal injections pursuant to a death penalty order.
Last week global pharma giant Pfizer became the last major firm to announce that it was taking steps to ensure that its products would not be procured for use in lethal injections (at least in the US).
This fell from concerns about the morality, if not the legality, of administering cocktails of drugs that did not always ensure a relatively swift and painless execution.
I blogged on this long-building issue some four years ago in relation to an EU-based firm exporting to the US: see here.
The more interesting question is whether this growing 'end-user due diligence' is capable
of wider analogy to other products, or is specific to this issue...
Jo
No comments:
Post a Comment