Human Rights and the Social Responsibility of the Corporation

What is the social responsibility of a corporation? This was the subject of a panel on the final day of last week's Ceres conference and some expressed surprise that it had snuck its way into a forum that was otherwise heavily focused on the environment. While there were some attempts to connect the subjects of human rights and environmental sustainability (for example, through reference to access to clean water as a basic human right), there was sufficient interest from conference attendees irrespective of such connections to fill up a whole room at a time when many could have been heading out to get back to their desks.

The session began with a brief Human Rights 101 talk by Christine Bader, Advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights, who gave a crisp and clear introduction to the topic. Ms. Bader traced the origins of today's dialogue to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which were adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 in response to the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime (The Declaration contains thirty articles, and while I won't recite them here, I encourage you to look up the Declaration and reflect upon the immense challenge of making basic rights reality for all human beings). More than sixty years after the adoption of the Declaration, Ms. Bader's boss, Harvard professor John Ruggie, is tasked with elaborating upon these rights to define the social responsibility of corporations with respect to human rights. Dr. Ruggie and his team distinguishes the responsibility of the corporation with the responsibility of the state: the state protects human rights, the corporation respects those rights, and the courts provide access to remedy.

Representatives on the panel made clear that even though Dr. Ruggie's framework is being adopted by many corporations in one way or another, there are still major hurdles in making sure that corporations fulfill their full social responsibility to respect human rights. Mike Vaudreuil of HP and Dan Bena of Pepsico offered complementary perspectives on the challenges their own companies have encountered trying to reduce or eliminate human rights abuses in their supply chains. Mr. Vaudreuil spoke about HP's supply chain efforts, both as an individual corporation and as a founding member of the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct, and gave a reasonably candid description of some of the obstacles HP faces (for example, how can procurement be certain that tantalum suppliers aren't sourcing from problematic mines in DRC?); Dan Bena of Pepsico focused heavily on process and overarching issues specific to his company, but offered some color through discussion of the challenges the company faced when confronted with allegations of draining the water supply in Kerala, India in 2003.

While the corporation presentations were revealing, some of the most valuable insights of the session came in the form of a report given to me by Bastian Buck of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Titled "Corporate Human Rights Reporting: An Analysis of Current Trends", the report finds that corporations still largely seem to equate their social responsibility to community with philanthropy, strategically avoiding discussion of negative impacts on society. Consistent with this, reporting is still dominated by discussion of policies and procedures rather than impact and outcomes, displays major gaps in reporting content (for example, reporting on progress in one facility without giving the bigger picture), and fails to discuss systemic human rights issues (for example, even though issues of unpaid overtime in the supply chain are rarely specific to one corporation, companies shy away from talking about challenges out of their control).

At the end of the session, I briefly pulled aside moderator Bennett Freeman of Calvert Investments to ask how his company goes about quantifying risks to corporations based on human rights abuses perpetrated through their operations or supply chains (I view this question as closely linked with the types of issues described in the GRI report mentioned above).  We agreed to find a time to speak at some point in the future, so stay tuned for future discussions about the social responsibility of corporations with respect to human rights.

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