In October 2020, the Government of Japan formulated a National Action Plan (NAP) on Business and Human Rights in response to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and ensuing greater international awareness of violations of human rights by corporations.1 In the NAP, the government of Japan stated that on the basis of the UNGPs, it expects companies to (i) formulate human rights policies, (ii) conduct due diligence with respect to human rights, and (iii) establish grievance mechanisms.2 In order to achieve these goals, businesses need to understand whether and how they are violating human rights and prepare appropriate solutions. Whistleblowers play a crucial role in this process.

The scale and scope of the climate crisis and its drastically worsening impacts means that even as a ‘climate due diligence’ obligation is increasingly taking shape as a dimension of human rights due diligence, there is also growing evidence of the limitations of this emerging norm. This article provides four critiques of climate due diligence based on its insufficiency, its conceptual ambiguity, its operational limitations, and its structural limitations. It argues that these critiques could be addressed by regulatory reform that draw clear ‘red lines’ based on the need to prevent the development of any new fossil fuel and address the ‘corporate capture’ of regulatory institutions by the fossil fuel industry. Additionally, it calls for reparations to ensure effective access to a remedy for existing and potential future climate-related human rights impacts that business has caused or contributed to.

The Kenyan flower industry is one of the largest in the world and it is estimated to contribute around one per cent to Kenya’s gross domestic product (GDP).1 According to the Kenya Flower Council (KFC), Kenya exports about 70 per cent of its cut flowers for sale on the European market.2 Women constitute around 65 to 75 per cent of the workforce in the Kenyan flower industry, performing unskilled and poorly paid jobs.3 Female floriculture workers in Kenya experience high rates of sexual harassment (SH) and other forms of workplace violence.4 SH is deeply rooted in power imbalances between the parties involved, which can impact on the ability of the victim to resist or expressly indicate that the conduct is unwelcome. Such power imbalance can threaten victims into silence, resulting in incidences going unreported.5 According to a study on gender, rights and participation in the cut flower industry in Kenya, SH is particularly prevalent among women who are supervised by male managers.6 It was found that the persistence of SH is related to the hierarchical employment structure of floriculture companies, coupled with the lack of female managerial staff, both of which also prevented women from reporting incidences of SH.

The take-up of mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD) initiatives by states is continuously gaining momentum. There are now numerous states adopting some form of HRDD laws. While corporations being duly diligent in respecting human rights is a positive step towards addressing problems of business and human rights, these HRDD initiatives on their own may only be a form of window-dressing, that is, enabling states to put a smart spin on their efforts to address business and human rights issues without addressing some of the root causes of that predicament. As a result, HRDD laws are likely to be a helpful, but insufficient tool for addressing corporate abuse of human rights. One reason for this is because the root cause of many business and human rights problems is the structural elements and goals of corporate law facilitates corporate violations of human rights. So long as states fail to transform the way in which corporations operate – in part, by reconceptualizing corporate law – even the best drafted HRDD laws will be inadequate to halt corporate harms.

Over 40 million people around the world are victims of modern forms of slavery: forced labour and human trafficking. People are tricked into working under onerous conditions, and unable to leave or return home due to physical, psychological or financial coercion, and many of these trafficking victims produce goods for United States (US) and other multinational corporations that profit by relying on the lower wages earned by workers in their global supply chains. Well-developed legal standards prohibit these practices, and governments, intergovernmental organizations, business associations and non-governmental organizations have developed mechanisms to prevent, detect and provide redress to victims. Some businesses lead or comply with the standards and enforcement mechanisms, but too many do not. US law offers a powerful but under-utilized tool to address trafficking: the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), which imposes civil liability on those who ‘knew or should have known’ about forced labour or human trafficking in their corporate ventures. Unfortunately, courts have ignored or misinterpreted this standard, at times confusing civil and criminal provisions of the statute. Correct and vigorous legal enforcement is key to addressing the accountability gap between the well-developed standards and the continuing use of forced labour and human trafficking. This article is the first to demonstrate that, with regard to the TVPRA standard, corporations have long been on notice of both the obligation to effectively monitor labour conditions and the mechanisms that would accomplish that task. US courts must enforce the ‘knew or should have known’ standard to protect workers – the most vulnerable people in the supply chain – and to prevent an unfair competitive advantage over companies that have established compliance programmes that actually prevent and punish human trafficking and forced labour.

The UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs) and their concept of human rights due diligence (HRDD) cannot succeed in their current form, because they reify neoliberalism’s public/private divide. This article establishes this argument across historical, theoretical, and normative dimensions, and charts a new way forward. The UNGPs’ separation of the ‘state duty to protect’ from the ‘corporate responsibility to respect’ reflects a contestable conception of companies as private actors: free to act/transact in any way that is not harmful. This is a problem because harm is often invisible, even when taking an active due-diligence approach. To resolve this, HRDD practices must also be based on the positive value of equality. However, businesses are more than mere agents; they also coordinate production and enable social connections. These structural features reveal a ‘missing fourth pillar’ of the UNGPs: a collective political responsibility to challenge and change our current world order.

The history of indigenous peoples from across the globe is marked by constant aggression, persecution and conflict. In these times, they are being obliged to confront the consequences of economic interests in their ancestral lands and natural resources, which often take the form of extractive projects conducted by corporate actors with the permission of governments. These abusive practices have led to a number of social, legal and political disputes, many of which have resulted in violence. All of this reveals that indigenous rights cases cannot be omitted in the study of the interrelation between business, human rights and security, since these three elements are present in many of them. In particular, the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights needs to be closely examined, as it is considered to be the regional system of human rights protection that has played the most prominent role in delimitating indigenous property rights.

As the climate and biodiversity crises gain unprecedented attention, many governments across the global north are taking legislative steps to address deforestation in supply chains linked to their domestic consumption or commercial activities, among them, the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU).1

How do migrant employees understand and articulate human rights in the British hospitality sector? This article contributes to the discussion on the translation of human rights responsibility in business by introducing ‘rights-talk’ as an analytical lens to explore and theorize about employees’ situated understanding and uses of human rights as a language and a moral evaluative frame. The analysis highlights the importance of (in)equality in employees’ everyday experience of rights, and points to several disincentives for them to engage with and in rights-talk including social and organizational disrespect, managerial disregard for employees’ claims, and their largely connotative use of human rights language. These insights advance theorizing and open research avenues on the significance of human rights in organizations from a bottom-up perspective, while the inquiry’s micro-level focus enriches business and human rights’ methodological toolbox. The findings are also significant for business human rights responsibility in contexts of heightened anti-immigration discourse and policies.

This article provides an overview of the key features of multinational human rights litigation in the United Kingdom, including the development of a tort-based parent company duty of care, the principles relating to forum non conveniens and applicable law and other key procedural and practical barriers to victims’ access to justice. The article highlights some of the actual and perceived limitations of litigation. It also considers the concurrent development of and mutually reinforcing relationship between MNC tort litigation and the field of Business & Human Rights.

The business and human rights field and the international LGBTI human rights agenda have evolved almost entirely separately. The United Nations ‘Standards of Conduct for Business on Tackling Discrimination against LGBTI People’ (2017) is the primary effort to bridge this gap. Although drafted in a way that strongly aligns with the second pillar of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on corporate responsibility, the dissemination of the Standards has mainly been untethered from the human rights framework and system. This article identifies the need to reassert the human rights foundations of the Standards and leverage their existing momentum to set out a more robust research and policy agenda for meaningfully accounting for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics in business and human rights frameworks. To that end, the article sets out priority areas for greater attention from researchers, decision-makers and advocates.

The business and human rights debate has essentially bypassed the media industry. This article addresses that gap in the debate by applying the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to the media. Application of human rights responsibilities to the media in accordance with the Guiding Principles is significantly complicated by the existence of media rights of freedom of expression. It is argued that the application of the Guiding Principles to the media industry leaves significant scope for it to be involved with serious and systemic human rights violations. This conclusion indicates that the Guiding Principles are an inadequately theorised tool for dealing with human rights responsibilities of the media. It may reveal deeper flaws in the Guiding Principles, which extend to industries other than the media. At the least, a dialogue between the human rights community and the media industry must commence in order to work out how human rights might apply in the context of the responsibilities of one of the world’s most important and powerful industries.

In a series of previous articles I have defended the claim that there are robust, theoretical justifications for concluding that corporations have human rights obligations and that those obligations are distinct from the larger set of human rights obligations that are properly attributed to states. Hsieh claims that corporations do not have human rights obligations. In this reply it is argued that even if one takes what Hsieh refers to as an ‘institutional approach’ to understanding the human rights obligations of states, corporations are nonetheless properly understood to have human rights obligations regarding those with whom they interact, such as workers, customers and community members.