Does 'business and human rights' risk becoming about everything, and so nothing?
What comprises the BHR 'field' is not neat and defined. It is evolving, as is the multi-faceted (but still gap-riddled) regulatory 'ecosystem' that governs business-human rights responsibility and remedy.
This lack of neatness, this open-endedness, is on one view both inevitable and desirable. We should not and probably cannot seek to be prescriptive about what 'counts' as a BHR issue.
Yet the question arises whether we should be a bit more strategic about what is likely to gain traction as a BHR issue, and about how widely we frame BHR, and about what we think corporations and other enterprises really have a meaningful responsibility for.
This post is prompted by a claim this week (here), related to litigation to this effect, that Unilever is somehow responsible for remedying the terrible human suffering of former employees resulting from post-election ethno-political violence in Kenya on the basis that some of the victims of this very complex, nation-wide violence were Unilever employees.
If by 'remedy' in BHR we really mean situations such as this, arguably BHR advocacy is over-reaching. If a demonstrably progressive firm like Unilever is accused of merely 'illusory' support for the UN Guiding Principles, how are we to foster meaningful engagement with other firms?
There are serious questions to be asked about how subsidiary corporate structures hamper access to forums for seeking effective remedy. Still, the underlying claim (that Unilever is responsible for compensating employee victims of violence that shook a whole country) has little basis in tort law, let alone human rights law. Championing this sort of speculative litigation (of all the BHR issues one could profile) shows a mindset that thinks the BHR phenomenon is far better established, far-reaching and powerful than it is. Ambition is fine; over-reach can just expose how under-developed things really are.
Just how useful and effective is the 'human rights' paradigm / lexicon in shifting business (and state) behaviour around social impact? However tempting it is to invoke it in support of all manner of worthy societal campaigns, is it really that effective?
BHR is about the many things potentially involved in preventing, minimising and remedying business-related human rights abuses (as well as encouraging and appropriately enrolling business in positive efforts at greater rights fulfilment and enjoyment). A central challenge in all this is to engage the attention of business and finance sector actors, informing and advising as well as accusing and chastising.
BHR is not just about the UN Guiding Principles or a narrow legalistic framing around the jurisprudence of international human rights law. Yet if websites or email updates on BHR become about listing all sorts of things that happen to involve companies, we have lost some powerful opportunity.
If BHR becomes about pretty much everything -- precarious work contract patterns; climate change and its governance; tax evasion and avoidance; corruption; mass political violence in east Africa -- it risks undermining itself. It risks alienating or confusing business audiences -- or being dismissed by them. It risks losing a vital connection with a credible, universal set of normative guarantees (human rights).
A related challenge is to remember that while BHR is somewhat in fashion in the field of human rights, it is still (tiringly and never-endingly) the state which must answer for the vast majority of human rights problems.
Jo
See an earlier articulation of some of the possible coherence challenges of the BHR field (2015, pp 6-7), here. See also this sceptical blog-post on linking the BHR phenomenon to climate change activism, here.
