Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights and Business Schools' Responsibility to Teach It: Incorporating Human Rights into the Sustainability Agenda

Abstract

The Preamble to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR) calls on every organ of society to teach and educate for the promotion of the rights it contains. However, few if any business schools have any systematic or critical human rights content in their accounting and business curricula. This oversight is increasingly problematic as concern grows over the burgeoning size and power of multinational corporations in relation to nation states, cases where large multinational corporations have been complicit in human rights violations, and increasing corporate roles in the provision of state services. This shift of human rights duties, responsibilities and accountability from nation states to corporations has resulted in a number of new United Nations initiatives, voluntary standards and international protocols to bring the UNDHR to bear on business activity. This paper explores how the universal human rights apparatus and discourse is impacting corporations' responsibilities for the protection and promotion of human rights and sustainable development. The emerging business and human rights discourse presents a number of challenges to the dominant ideology taught in business schools and is likely to be resisted. This paper presents a moral and pragmatic case for incorporating human rights into business and accounting education at tertiary and professional levels. It also outlines the principles that should underpin attempts to effectively integrate human rights into the accounting and business curricula as well as exploring the articulation between the human rights and sustainability discourses.

Keywords:

• Human rights
• sustainability
• guiding principles
• globalization
• professions
• public interest

Notes

Human Rights Watch (2005) claimed AngloGold Ashanti made payments to a ‘murderous armed group’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to gain access to DRC's natural resources. An expert report to the UN Security Council in January 2007 reported a clear link between the activities of armed militia and the exploitation of the DRC's natural resources.

The accounting literature does contain some research on human rights, although not always labelled as such. Adams and McPhail (2004) provide an analysis of corporate engagement with discrimination. However, a discussion that seeks to frame corporate social responsibility in terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is substantively missing.

See Critical Perspectives on Accounting (Volume 22, Issue 8) for an attempt to systematically engage accounting research with the emerging human rights discourse.

These include but are not limited to: the ideology of the autonomous, dignified individual, the pragmatist engagement with corporations, and the neo-liberal belief in markets.

The Tax Justice Network, along with 80 other NGOs, called for greater transparency in the reporting of turnover, profit, and tax by country, based on figures that suggest that tax dodging costs developing economies $160 billion a year, which is greater than they receive in aid (e.g. see Christian Aid, 2009).

As Douzinas (2000, p. 7) explains: ‘The prime function of human rights is to construct the individual person as a subject (of law)’.

See also Muchlinski (2001).

See also the work by International Commission of Jurists at www.icj.org

The International Council on Mining and Minerals (ICMM), a body set up to champion the mining sector's interests, commented that: ‘One example is the current lack of clarity over the boundaries between companies and states in upholding human rights while seeking to uphold human rights within their legitimate “sphere of influence”, for example, companies also clearly need to avoid becoming political actors, or interfere in the political affairs of host countries’ (International Council on Mining and Minerals, 2006, p. 4). This comment seems naïve and ignores the obvious point that companies are political actors and do have an impact on the affairs of host countries.

The BLIHR brought together a group of 10 major companies with the aim of embedding human rights more firmly within corporate consciousness. BLIHR's objective was to indicate how international human rights standards could be applied in the context of business policy and practice. The BLIHR was superseded in March 2009 by the Global Business Initiative on Human Rights, which focuses on the application of human rights to business practice in emerging economies (BLIHR, 2010, p. 8). This new body engaged with a further question: ‘how do human rights contribute to the way a business might understand its (mainly moral) responsibilities to the broader international development agenda?’ (BLIHR, 2010, p. 8).

The UN Norms were never adopted by the Commission on Human Rights, although they were not rejected either.

‘Human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises’, UN Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 2005/69, adopted 20 April 2005, para 1(a).

Nolan (2010, p. 16) commented that ‘the principles cited in the Global Compact do not constitute a sufficient basis for designing enforceable standards and are beneficial more from the point of view of acting as yet another indicator in the global arena of the general relevance of international human rights norms to business […]. Along with the lack of specificity in defining the relevant rights, is a vagueness concerning the scope of the initiative, in particular the degree of responsibility a company assumes in embracing, supporting and enacting these rights’.

Some NGOs felt that the language didn't go far enough in specifying governmental and corporate responsibility for violations.

Grounding business responsibility in terms of activities and relationships clarifies the amorphous notion of ‘sphere of influence’ (Taylor, 2011).

Responsibility for overseeing the development and application of the Guiding Principles has not been located within the Global Compact, which may be reflective of sentiments regarding the Global Compact's lack of legitimacy.

The Compact now has around 4000 business members from all corners of the world, although another 70,000 TNEs and countless millions of small and medium-sized enterprises are not yet parties to the Global Compact Principles (Oxford Pro Bono, 2008).

NCPs report to the OECD Committee on International Investment and Multinational Enterprises (CIME) on an annual basis.

The company proposed to build an opencast bauxite mine near the holy site of Niyamgiri.

The UN has now ratified a right to water and sanitation (UN Resolution A/HRC/15/L.14).

Adams et al. (2011) are critical of the separation of the MDG of sustainability and poverty reduction goals implicit within the Millennium Development Goals. They contend that there is a clear need for strategies to alleviate poverty and sustainability strategies to be aligned.

The OECD articulated a need to construe a ‘decent’ environment as a human right, a point to which the International Labour Organization also alluded (Shelton, 1991). The right to a healthy environment is contained within the Bill of Rights of the South African constitution (Tilbury et al., 2002).

While all environmental degradation does have an impact on the enjoyment of rights, it can also promote other rights, or the rights of others.

This can often happen in relation to economic development, where a right to development is prioritized over other civil and political rights.

There are questions as to whether the right to development is a right in its own or is constructed from other human rights.

Agyeman, Bullard and Evans (2002) present the inclusion of the human rights into the environmental and sustainability agenda as a challenge to the sustainability agenda's focus on biodiversity.

Indeed, Taylor (2000) links the success of environmentalism with its links to the civil rights movement.