A Comparative Analysis of Stakeholder Dialogue Regimes

Principal Investigator: Shereen Hertel

Stakeholder dialogues are integral to conflict negotiation in business settings worldwide. They are a central tool in the business and human rights field, legitimated and professionalized in the early 2000s during the mandate of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Business & Human Rights, John G. Ruggie. This project analyzes the scope of stakeholder dialogues taking place globally (drawing on the 6,000 company dataset of the New York and London-based Business & HR Resource Centre); explores the historical evolution of varying forms of public dialogue around business harm and benefits from the 1970s to present; develops a two-company in-depth case study of successful and failed stakeholder dialogues in a single industry and geographic region; and explores concrete mechanisms for enhancing the practice and content of stakeholder consultation with a view toward empowering the most vulnerable among workers and community members.

Featured Publication

Tethered Fates: Companies, Communities, and Rights at Stake
by Shereen Hertel
Oxford University Press, 2019

Assessing the Human Rights Impact of Sustainable Finance Instruments

Principal Investigator: Stephen Park

The global capital markets—and, by extension, private issuers, investors, and other financial market participants—are expected to play a growing role in supporting the fulfillment of economic and social rights. A key challenge for the incorporation of human rights is determining how to measure, assess, and report on the human rights performance of a given financial instrument by a given issuer. This project addresses this challenge in the context of green bonds, social bonds, sustainability bonds, and similar fixed-income debt instruments that are used to finance projects with a specific social benefit (such as education, employment, housing, or healthcare). The use of proceeds of these financial products, as well as the process by which they are created, sold, traded, marketed, and applied, can be defined by reference to specific human rights. This project examines the use of metrics and indicators, reporting standards, due diligence, and third-party assessment for the purpose of evaluating regulatory approaches to innovation in finance and human rights.

Featured Publication

Social Bonds for Sustainable Development: A Human Rights Perspective on Impact Investing
by Stephen Park
Business and Human Rights Journal, 2018

Speech Remedies: Toward State and Corporate Accountability for the Harms of Online Speech

Principal Investigator: Molly Land
This project develops an interdisciplinary framework based on human rights law for responding to harmful speech online in ways that balance protection from the harms of speech with safeguards for freedom of expression. Current approaches to harmful online speech ignore important lessons from the history of media regulation while also failing to recognize the ways in which the internet ecosystem presents unique challenges. Lack of deep engagement with theories of speech harms and remedies also results in a misalignment of policy that elides critical distinctions between types of harms.

This project seeks to connect online speech regulation to both history and theory to understand what, if anything, is new about these problems and how law can and should respond. It draws on international human rights law to develop recommendations for both state and corporate actors in responding to harmful speech online. Its goal is to use human rights law as the basis for a global law of the internet that can be applied by companies and states alike to address the very real harms of speech while also protecting free expression.

Corporate Accountability Mechanisms

Principal Investigator: Rachel Chambers
The key accountability mechanisms in the business and human rights field may be summarized as judicial and non-judicial processes, and domestic laws requiring non-financial disclosure and, increasingly, human rights due diligence. Tort litigation is one of the primary mechanisms of judicial accountability. The project explores the legal trends in tort liability for human rights violations by corporate actors in the U.S. and other home states, both as a matter of substantive and procedural law, and the role of human rights due diligence in the development of this law. Statutes mandating modern slavery disclosure continue to be enacted, despite widely expressed concern about their fitness for purpose as an accountability mechanism. The project focuses on regulatory and litigation approaches that enable human rights disclosure to be used as an accountability mechanism. A common theme that links the threads of research is the challenge of employing extraterritorial accountability mechanisms to address corporate misconduct, in particular from the perspective of the victim.