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BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

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DILEMMAS AND SOLUTIONS
- edited by RORY SULLIVAN
with a foreword by MARY ROBINSON
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Foreword by Mary Robinson:
Fundamental questions are being asked around the world about responsiblities of
businesses for the protection and promotion of human rights
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- 1990s could be characterised as a period of business reluctance to become actively
involved in the human rights debate
- recent years have seen a growing willingness (at least among leading companies ) to
seize the opportunities and responsibilities that global citizenship brings
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Reading the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights , we see that issues such as
health, housing and education have equal prominence
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When such a standard emerges, it is highly likely that it will be
based on the international human rights norms
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GLOBALISATION, BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The globalisation of the world economy offers both unprecedented opportunities and
unprecedented threats for companies
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Recommendations of the UN Human Rights Sub-Commission on Companies and Human
Rights:
Companies must respect and promote the following rights:
● Right to equal opportunity and non-discriminatory treatment
● Rights to security of person
● Rights of workers (companies shall not use forced or compulsory labour, shall
respect the rights of children, shall provide a safe and healthy workforce, shall
provide them workers with remuneration that allows for an adequate standard of

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●
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living for them and their families, shall ensure the freedom of association and the
right to collective bargaining)
Respect for national sovereignity and human rights (including non paying bribes,
ensuring that the company’s goods and services are not used to abuse human rights,
respecting civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights in particular, the rights to
development, adequate food and drinking water, hightest attainable standard of
physical and mental health, adequate housing, education, freedom of thought,
conscience and religion, freedom of opinion)
Consumer protection
Environmental protection

The fall of Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the virtual disappearance of communism
brought radical changes to the world scene
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What was new was
the speed with which privatisation and foreign investment were embraced by countries that
had previously believed in state control of economy
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The supply chains of the supermarkets and the
consumer goods industries spread even more widely and deeply into the developing
countries of Asia, Africa and South America
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Many countries, with goverments lacking any democratic legitimacy, provided a context of
corruption, injustice, internal conflicts and human right violations
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With the economic benefits that globalisation could bring came significant collateral damage
to human rights for which companies were responsible
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Personhood is a metaphysical category that may or may not be unique to​ Homo sapiens
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Jack Donnely 1999: 87
“One of the things that makes us human is our capacity to create and change our culture
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Westerners
have in recent centuries been especially insensitive in their approach to such differences
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Frequently, however, poor citizens and disfavoured groups are not
provided with the same level of protection for their legal rights as the economic and political
elite
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A
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Melden (Melden 1977:167-68)
Employers may deny employees their inalienable right to freedom and well-being, whether or
notlocal govenments are complicit, but in doing so they in no way diminish the legitamacy of
the claims of their employees to those rights
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There are two extremes in the relationship between MNEs and human rights abuses in
developing countries that are considered intolerable by NGOs
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an MNE itself directly abuses human rights: for instance, working with security
personnel who use violence against the local population, abusing land rights of
indigenous people, or forcing employees to refrain from unionsing
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a country’s government engages in large-scale, serious violationsof human rights,
and the mere fact that the company does business with or in this country is interpeted
as supportive of the government
In practice, the situation between MNEs and human rights lies somewhere between the
extremes

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