ABSTRACT
This article is concerned with multinational companies’ moral obligation not to acquiesce in the human rights risks that pervade their supply chains. In ethical and political debates, this moral minimum is generally grounded in a duty to avoid complicity, which urges the company to reduce its potential relatedness to the human rights risks in question, rather than to alleviate the threat as such. Contrary to this conventional view, this article contends that human rights due diligence is the content of a duty of assistance. It demands that companies tackle head-on the human rights risks that typically and foreseeably occur in certain parts of their supply chains. This reasoning goes beyond the scope of due diligence as conventionally understood, and it finally informs a normative account of the (political) role that business enterprises should take regarding mandatory due diligence legislation at the national and supranational level.
