8 - Transnational corporations and human rights

Summary

We saw in chapter 7 that the international law of human rights was directed mainly to public authorities like states and their governments, but that private non-profit actors like human rights advocacy groups helped shape the rights discourse and action. In this chapter we will show that for-profit private actors like transnational corporations have a tremendous effect on persons in the modern world, for good or ill. For the first fifty years after the adoption of the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these business enterprises mostly fell outside the mainstream debate about the promotion and protection of internationally recognized human rights. This was so despite the fact that the leaders of the German firm I.G. Farben had faced legal justice at the Nuremberg Trials for their role in the Holocaust. This general situation was changing in the early twenty-first century. Attention to transnational corporations and human rights constitutes a new frontier in the international discourse on human rights. Non-profit human rights groups, along with the media and particularly consumer organizations and movements, are targeting the corporations. The result is renewed pressure on public authorities, especially states, to adopt norms and policies ensuring that business practices contribute to, rather than contradict, internationally recognized human rights. The corporations themselves are under considerable pressure to pay attention to human rights, although there remain formidable structural obstacles to a broad corporate social responsibility that includes human rights.