Business and human rights: framing issues

If the 'business and human rights' agenda becomes about everything, it will end up standing for (and achieving) nothing.

I noted this in a recent Chatham House paper referred to in the previous post.

This week, The Economist released a report showing how unsure business people are about what is required of them in relation to a responsibility to respect human rights.

I suppose my perspective is shaped by a legal background, such that to describe something in human rights terms is to suggest that one is dealing with activity that impairs recognised rights, activity with legal consequences, invoking all the regulatory power of profound universal norms.

This is not how the current 'business and human rights' (BHR) debate proceeds, as my paper noted. 

Instead, as a roundtable in London yesterday reinforced, many proponents see the BHR debate as very broad, relating to issues from 'tax justice' to 'casualisation of labour'. In none of these areas can it credibly be said that a business violates someone's human rights in ways that international (or even national) law, as it exists today, would recognise.

The BHR agenda is, I think, at something of a cross-roads.

The breadth of the BHR agenda and the resonance of framing things as 'human rights' is part of its power, power that might contribute to shifting the very nature of capitalism and the corporation's role in society.

Framed positively, the conversation can be one about how to solve social problems and create shared value, not about narrow issues of compliance, liability, remedy.

Yet the very power that the BHR project has is derived from the fact that 'human rights' are norms recognised, over time and by the consensus of states, as deserving special protection as a function of their universality. Seen this way, it may be tempting to recruit 'human rights' for every campaign about changing how business operates, but this risks diluting the force of the principles and claims that give BHR resonance in the first place.

Jo

These issues are the subject of a forthcoming research paper at Chatham House.