یک برنامه تحقیقاتی در مورد تجارت بین الملل و حقوق بشر
Abstract
1- BHR: a brief overview
2- IB, responsible business, and human rights
3- The value-added of a human rights perspective
4- Bringing IB and BHR together
5- Conclusion
References
Abstract
The discussion on business responsibilities for human rights is thriving – although, surprisingly, predominantly outside of the International Business (IB) field. This article introduces business and human rights (BHR) as a research area with great potential for IB scholars. IB scholarship has much to offer when it comes to better understanding the relation between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and human rights. BHR, on the other hand, is a field that can no longer be ignored by IB research if the field is to remain at the forefront of scholarship in globalization-related issues concerning MNEs. Therefore, this perspective article aims at providing guidance to IB scholars interested in engaging in BHR research by tracing common themes and overlaps, and outlining a research agenda that addresses some of the research gaps and open questions in both fields.
BHR: a brief overview
Granted that human rights have traditionally been thought to relate exclusively to government conduct, there has been a thriving discussion on the respective responsibilities of business since the mid-1990s (Wettstein, 2012) (see Table 1 for a timeline of the discussion). Already in the 1970s, the UN and OECD had launched parallel initiatives to regulate the business activities of MNEs through international codes of conduct. Both the UN Draft Code, drafted by the then newly-established Center for Multinational Corporations, and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises contained a paragraph connecting corporate conduct with human rights. While the UN Draft Code was never adopted and the UN Center dissolved in the 1990s, the OECD Guidelines have become one of the most important global codes on corporate responsibility and contain a full chapter on corporate human rights responsibility today, modeled on the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – UNGPs – a soft-law initiative identifying the responsibility of companies to respect universal human rights as they operate locally or globally (Ruggie, 2011). The context and experience of Western MNEs operating in apartheid South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s influenced both codes of conduct and their outlook on human rights and business relations with authoritarian and racist regimes. It also inspired some first academic writings on the connection between corporations and human rights in the late 1980s (see, e.g., Donaldson 1989). However, despite such contexts, initiatives and early writings, a systematic debate on BHR started to emerge only during the mid-1990s against the background on the one hand of the involvement of Western oil companies – among them particularly Shell – in large-scale environmental destruction and human rights abuse in Nigeria, and on the other hand of breaking stories concerning sweatshop conditions and child labor in the production facilities of the suppliers of major Western sporting firms like Nike. BHR is to be seen as distinct from the broader CSR discussion. One of the most striking differences between the two is that BHR emerged predominantly from legal scholarship, while CSR has its root in management studies (Ramasastry 2015). Accordingly, the early BHR debate in the late 1990s and early 2000s was focused predominantly on clarifying potential bases of legal human rights accountability of corporations (Frey 1997; Ratner 2001) and non-state actors more generally (Clapham 2006), their status under international human rights law (Muchlinski 2001), and forms and foundations of corporate complicity (Clapham and Jerbi 2001).