ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP). The Guiding Principles are standards for governments to manage the human rights risks arising from their firms’ activities and for corporations to manage the human rights risks in their operations. Yet the Guiding Principles employ largely incompatible logics of risk. On the one hand, these standards state that human rights risks are ‘the business enterprise’s potential adverse human rights impacts’. On the other hand, the Guiding Principles are meant to be incorporated into existing enterprise risk management practices, which are based on an economic logic of loss and return. The chapter builds on the existing literature to show how these two risk logics cannot be reconciled without further clarity in the standards. Using case studies of the Danish government and a Danish corporation, it is shown how the two contrary risk logics complicate implementation of the Guiding Principles.
