ABSTRACT
Largely unnoticed by the management of most companies, an intense debate has developed in recent years on the issue of business and human rights. But, actually, the issue is not new, because specialist human rights groups even back in the 1980s linked multinational companies in the extractive sector (oil, diamonds, gold, precious metals) with human rights abuses at their local mining sites (for examples of current problems, see Amnesty International 2003; AI DRC 2003; see also
Chandler 1998; Gberie 2003). The Human Development Report 2000 (UNDP 2000: 79 ff.) pointed out that ‘global corporations’ have an ‘enormous impact on human rights-in their employment practices, in their environmental impact, in their support for corrupt regimes or their advocacy for policy changes’ and called for corporate human rights standards, implementation measures and independent audits’. The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, revised in 2000, had already included a reference to human rights (OECD 2000a: 19). What is new, however, is the dynamic increase over the past three years or so in the breadth and depth of the general business-related human rights debate.2
