Beyond Due Diligence: the Human Rights Corporation
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Beyond Due Diligence: the Human Rights Corporation Benjamin Gregg 1 Accepted: 14 September 2020/
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The modern corporation offers significant potential to contribute to the human rights project, in part because it is free from the challenges posed by national sovereignty. That promise has begun to be realized in businesses practicing corporate due diligence with regard to the human rights of persons involved in or affected by those enterprises. Yet due diligence preserves the self-seeking orientation of the conventional corporation and seeks only to protect itself from committing human rights abuses. This approach, typified by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, does not address background conditions for and root causes of vulnerability to human rights abuses. My alternative, the human rights corporation, takes an other-regarding orientation that advances human rights within the corporation and in its human, social, economic, and natural environments. It moves beyond the due diligence carrot-and-stick model to a model in which the corporation produces not only goods and services but also human rights consciousness and practice as well. Keywords Corporation . Human rights . Due diligence . Corporate responsibility . Human rights corporation . UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
There are approximately 80,000 multinational corporations in the world today (Ruggie 2017:7). About 80% of gross exports are linked to their networks.1 These exports account for approximately one of every seven jobs worldwide.2 While some corporations, national and multinational, constitute one source of human rights abuses, they have significant potential to contribute to the human rights project—if they can be 1
UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2013 (Geneva 2013):135.
2
International Labour Organization, Decent Work in Global Supply Chains (2016), http://www.ilo.org/ilc/ ILCSessions/105/reports/reports-to-the-conference/WCMS_468097/lang–en/index.htm 3
This notion includes small and medium enterprises as well as business enterprises owned or controlled by the state, or that receive substantial state support.
* Benjamin Gregg [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
B. Gregg
transformed into what I develop as a human rights corporation (HRC).3 That potential remains unrealized today even as “multinationals across a broad array of sectors adopted codes of conduct in the 1990s, together with supply chain audits and other forms of monitoring” (ibid., 8). My proposal contributes to long-standing debates about the goals of corporate governance, debates identified variously by the terms corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, or corporate sustainability.4 These terms are more or less synonymous: they all refer to voluntary corporate behavior oriented not on increasing shareholder wealth but rather benefiting not only shareholders but also groups quite beyond shareholders, including persons associated w
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