Business and human rights
Human rights corporate accountability guide: from law to norms to values
Understanding and internalising human rights obligations in the corporate sector
Authors:
J.F. Sherman; C. Pitts
Publisher:
Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative [Harvard University], 2008
Ensuring a robust corporate culture that supports and respects human rights is critical to preventing business-related human rights abuses. This paper presents an accountability guide showing how a company can align its behavior with human rights goals imposed on it externally or arising from its internal commitments.
The paper argues that a company must: understand what the law forbids; understand what the law requires; take into account so-called soft law arising from the growing international web of multi-stakeholder initiatives and public and private codes and norms; and internalise these internal and external standards by living up to their letter and spirit.
This requires sound management and authentic leadership, resulting in the adoption of human rights values as core corporate values that manifest themselves in day-to-day actions, and may include the following steps:
- developing a human rights vision and strategy that is rooted in the company’s business and integrated into the company’s core values
- leading with the right incentives - defining conduct that the company expects of its employees and designing an incentive system to produce that conduct
- distributing ownership of human rights - ownership of the corporate responsibility for recognising and respecting human rights must spread from the top throughout the organisation in an integrated fashion
- caring about and respecting the human rights of others –avoiding unnecessary harm to others and respecting the rights of others
- appreciating the power of asking questions - companies need to require their executives and managers to ask key questions to identify the hidden ethical issues in a business decision
- listening to human rights problems and fixing them – a company must have an open and trusting culture which places a premium on transparency and systemic study of failures
- using effective assurance mechanisms - a company must have rigorous, system-wide assurance mechanisms to ensure that it is complying with its own policies, and where it is not, to take corrective action
- appreciating the local culture without derogating respect for human rights - while human rights are universal, it is important to permit sensible variation in the particular steps that companies may use to apply them
