Business and human rights: hasten slowly?

Does the emerging field of business and human rights (BHR) risk developing a credibility problem?

The overall BHR challenge is in some ways the opposite of any credibility problem -- it is rather an awareness, uptake and implementation problem.

But it is arguable that from a strategic perspective, building that awareness and responsiveness to BHR issues and principles (by business and finance, as well as governments, civil society, and consumers) is best served by guarding against over-expansive claims in the name of BHR.

An Australian report this week illustrates both the potential and current limitations of efforts to promote business respect for human rights standards.

The report (here) is the latest by 'No Business in Abuse' to look at the responsibilities of a parent transnational corporation (and its creditor financial institutions) where one of its company's operations include running controversial offshore detention centres for the Australian government pursuant to that government's strategy to control irregular migration.

The report highlights the scope, faced with such issues, for advocacy actions that might influence corporate compliance with human rights standards, directly and through prompting creditors and others with commercial leverage to influence the company's conduct. The report shows how this scope exists regardless of whether one can yet be categorically clear about any binding legal obligations on companies.

But (at the risk of sounding churlish on what is important and persuasive work), the report also to me illustrates a credibility risk for BHR advocacy.

It makes two calls, the first of which is so far beyond the company's power to achieve that it undermines the force of the report. The company is called on to do something it has absolutely no legal or other power to do (release detainees into humane conditions in Australia).*

Is it petty or too provocative to say that the field of BHR will have evolved when such recommendations are more realistic?

On this note, this week's The Guardian also carried a story (here) on this company and issue and report, but also referenced a Stanford University legal opinion. I have not read it, but its claim that the company's employees may be involved in 'crimes against humanity' in these detention centers is (in legal terms) a massive over-reach. That grave international crime requires a systematic attack on a civilian population -- however bad conditions might be in those centers, the business of detention can hardly be described as an 'attack'.

Advocacy efforts need alarm bells rung, but alarmist analysis arguably does not achieve the principal aim -- to influence corporate conduct and so improve human rights protection. The company quite understandably was able reasonably to reject the Stanford analysis...

BHR advocacy needs to call out problematic business behaviours, but also offer practical and achievable alternative actions for business actors.

Jo

* I note that the recommendation goes on to suggest (as an alternative to Australian relocation), relocation to some setting with equivalent humane conditions.