Towards a human-rights-friendly business activities

Corporations, as a social institution, produce various economic values through interactions with multiple stakeholders (employees, workers, consumers and the local population around their business operations). As they have significant impacts on the life improvement of many people and the development of the world, their impacts on human rights cannot be ignored either. While on the one hand corporations can support basic human rights through their business activities, on the other hand there are many occasions where human rights are ignored. This last decade, many national and multinational corporations have been sued in the courts for alleged human rights abuses related to minimum wages, workplace health and safety, child labors, land grabbing, ill-treatment of workers due to discrimination and complicity in crimes with local governments and armed forces. Having said that, due to the lack of regulatory norms for the transboundary activities of mutinational corporations, at present only very few corporations can be held responsible.

In order to fill this regulatory gap, in 2011 the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted the "Building Principles on Business and Human Rights." it lays down the necessity of corporate responsibility to respect human rights, given the fact that, there is a possibility that States are not able to protect its citizens from human rights abuses by corporations. Th Guiding Principles require corporations to set up commitment to respect human rights and to carry out "human rights due delligence" mechanism in order to identify human rights risks and to access potential and actual human rights impacts. This project will explore various means and possibilities for any concrete policies for the implementation of the Guiding Principles both at the national and international levels, and to examine the extent to which those means and policies effective to demand respect for human rights in business activities.