ABSTRACT
This article takes as its starting point the responsibility placed upon corporations by the United Nations’ (UN) Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework as elaborated upon by the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to respect human rights. The overt pragmatism and knowledge of the complex business relationships that are embedded in global production led John Ruggie, the author of the framework, to adopt a structure for the relationship between human rights and business that built on the existing practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR). His intention was that these practices should be developed to embrace respect for human rights by exhorting corporations to move from ‘the era of declaratory CSR’1 to showing a demonstrable policy commitment to respect for human rights. The prime motivation for corporations to do this was, according to
*Email: s.wheeler@qub.ac.uk
The International Journal of Human Rights, 2015 Vol. 19, No. 6, 757-778, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2015.1016712
Sa ly eeler
CORPORATE POWER AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Ruggie, because the responsibility to respect was one that would be guarded and judged by the ‘courts of public opinion’ as part of the social expectations imposed upon corporations or to put it another way as a condition of a corporation’s social licence to operate.2
