Developing New Mechanisms for Corporate Accountability

Human rights violations involving corporations are reported more frequently in public media and have been the subject of a growing number of civil litigation and human rights cases in the courts. However, there remains an accountability gap in international law as it is applied to corporations, since states remain the primary duty holders. One consequence of this is that businesses that are involved in human rights violations generally cannot be held accountable in human rights courts for those violations.

In June 2011, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution which emphasises that transnational corporations and other business enterprises have a responsibility to respect human rights. This resolution established a Working Group to report to the UN Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Working Group will be charged with looking at how best to implement the United Nations Framework for Business and Transnational Corporations. There is currently a related but separate set of discussions at the level of international law which proposes to include non-state actors (including businesses) as duty holders in human rights law.

This research seeks to contribute practical ideas about how new forms of restitution and redress for corporate human rights violations might be developed. It proposes to draw upon the experience of senior officials and judges in two of the leading international/human rights courts to explore the feasibility and desirability of developing new mechanisms for dealing with corporate human rights violations.

The research will gather the views and experiences of those key experts in human rights law in two days of workshop discussions that will explore how the law might be developed appropriately to deal with corporate human rights violations. The information that is gathered at those workshops and the data recorded will then be analysed and presented in an academic article and in a briefing that will be circulated in international and human rights courts, in the relevant departments of the United Nations and other international political organisations, and in major NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. A second academic article will report on the value of using this approach for developing innovative ideas for political and legal change in other research projects.

The proposed research is designed to maximise the impact upon the development of international law and the institutions responsible for the administration and implementation of international law. Participants will benefit from participation in the workshops through meeting other professionals who are seeking to understand the development of this aspect of human rights law. Beyond this immediate, and relatively small group of beneficiaries, the proposed research will impact significantly upon the following user groups.

1) International Courts and Law Commissions (including the European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights; Inter-American Commission of Human Rights; African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights; African Commission of Human and Peoples' Rights). Those users of the research findings will benefit from having an informed, practically focused set of proposals for the reform of the law that will be consistent with the general direction of proposals on the development of an international human rights court (a discussion of those proposals can be found in the attached case for support).

2) Communities and groups most affected by non-human rights compliant business activity will benefit from the prospects of opening up new mechanisms of redress that are firmly based in principles of international law.

3) The business community (including international and transnational business organisations and international business associations). Business organisations are likely to benefit from the search for a meaningful normative framework in the sense that such mechanisms will improve socially responsible planning and will help minimise the harmful impacts of business upon communities. Business organisations are also likely to benefit considerably from the legal clarity that such reforms will bring. The development of new mechanisms for dealing with corporate human rights abuses raises ethical standards of business generally and levels the playing field for business actors that are generally compliant with human rights law. The longer term benefits will be realised in encouraging sustainable economic growth and political stability.

4) International Political Organisations
In so far as the proposed research seeks to develop practical mechanisms that have remained a concern to the UN Human Rights Council and its predecessor Commission since the 1980s, culminating in the establishment of a new UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (see attached case for support for a discussion), the proposed research will provide some impetus to those debates, and contribute to the work of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights. The debates have reached into the Council of Europe, the Organisation of American States and the African Union, organisations that are also likely to be interested in the findings of the research.

5) NGOs and their constituents are likely to benefit from the development of mechanisms that address key concerns of organisations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The issue of business involvement in human rights has been a core concern of those NGOs, amongst many others, over the past 15 years.

The impact upon those beneficiaries will be realised through the dissemination strategy set out in the 'Pathways to Impact' attachment.