Knowledge of Human Rights Risks - Company Friend or Enemy?

Is knowledge of human rights risks a company’s friend or its enemy? No one likes bad news, and messengers who deliver it may choose to do so gingerly. But it’s critically important for a company to investigate, understand, and act on facts - however...

Contribute to UN Work on Business and Human Rights

What does a good corporate human rights policy look like? What should trigger a company's assessment of its human rights impacts? When should human rights be integrated into other business processes, and when should they stand alone?

To gather...

Where the Rubber Meets the Road - Human Rights, Business and Local Government

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school...

Financial Reform - Making the Human Rights Case

In announcing his financial reform proposals last week, US President Barack Obama pledged: “never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”

This commitment underlies his proposals for regulatory reform of...

Small Change - Why Business Won’t Save the World

What’s the best way for business to contribute to realizing human rights? I’ve been pondering that question over the last few days in the light of Google’s decision to oppose censorship and protect the email accounts of activists in China, going so...

Google China Decision: ‘Remarkable, Courageous, Far-Reaching’

The global Internet giant Google has taken a remarkable, courageous, and far-reaching decision when it said it would stop censoring its search engine in China.

As Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond explained in a candid blog, Google took...

The Institute’s Challenge

The idea behind the Institute for Human Rights and Business is that impacts by companies on human rights need, firstly, to be much more widely understood and publicised. Secondly, we need to find mechanisms that can integrate the process of...

Timberland - Business Willing to Engage but a Multi-Stakeholder Effort Needed

IHRB's Executive Director John Morrison wrote a compelling post in late September about the need for rapid scaling of progress on human rights – a view we wholeheartedly share. It has taken us 15 years to get to where we are – to create what can...

The Bitter Harvest of Uzbek Cotton

Once again in Uzbekistan this autumn, another bitter harvest is ending. Observers from different regions around the country are reporting that between 1.5 and 2 million teenagers, as well as children as young as nine years old, are missing school...

Are Governments Ready to Play Their Role in the Emerging Arena of Business and Human Rights?

The emerging policy and practice arena of “business and human rights” has become a relay race in which states have largely been observers rather than athletes on the track. There have been some notable exceptions, but generally governments have been...

The Business of Migration - Migrant Worker Rights in a Time of Financial Crisis

The Institute for Human Rights and Business is embarking on a three-year process of addressing the role of the private sector in migrant worker protection. The increased risk of abuse of migrants’ rights within the current financial crisis, coupled...

Operationalising Human Rights - How Hard are Companies Trying? 

Our commentary on the Trafigura case highlights how a combination of weak governance and business expediency can result in negative impacts on human rights. But what exactly should business do to prevent such situations arising in the first place?

Getting Land Acquisition Right

"Eminent domain" (also known as "appropriation", "compulsory purchase" or "expropriation" in some countries), the legal principle under which a government can take over private property for public purpose after paying due compensation - even if the...

Food Security and the Private Sector - Thinking about Human Rights?

This week the UN released its latest findings on the extent of world hunger. The report – marking World Food Day 2009 and its theme - "Achieving food security in times of crisis" - makes for grim reading.

More than one billion people around the...

Red Flags - Risks of Liability for Companies Operating in High Risk Zones

This op-Ed was originally published on TheGuardian.com.

With the web of international law growing denser, companies as well as political and military leaders are becoming liable for human rights abuses

When the Rome statute of the international...