‘Big Data on BHR: Innovative Approaches to Analysing the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre Database’, a recently published article in the Business and Human Rights Journal, provides new insights into the study of business and human rights (BHR). The article overcomes a difficulty in studying BHR by using an open data source, a treasure trove of information. The article illustrates the importance of the new tool by providing an overview of how the data are collected and preliminary analysis of current issues in BHR across companies, geographies, time and industries.  These descriptive data serve as an important contribution in first understanding which issues are most prevalent, across geographies, industries and companies and second for future analyses.

This article and the data they are reporting on will represent a quantum leap in the study of BHR by opening up this field for quantitative analysis using big data. Among the questions this (newly) accessible data can be used to address are: 

• What increases a corporation’s propensity to invest in and improve its human rights practices?
• How do different levels of trade and foreign direct investment affect BHR practices?
• How do different company sizes/industry/specialization/capital affect BHR practices?

These questions have long evaded answers due to ‘the proprietary nature of much BHR data; incomparability of information across firms, sectors or regions; and coding challenges of existing information.’ (p. 1). These data will undoubtedly contribute to our ability to understand better the linkages between BHR practices.

As important as these data will be, there are some caveats that should be pointed out. As the authors note, the source material for these data are from ‘media articles and non-governmental organization (NGO) reports concerning allegations against companies, along with company responses to such allegations’ (p. 2).

Perhaps the most basic is the claim of the unbiased nature of this data.  While it is true that the Political Terror Scale (PTS) project, which I direct, relies solely on “reported” allegations (and governments will go to great lengths to ensure that their human rights violations are not “reported”), it is important to point out that the PTS uses the same source material each year:  the annual reports of the State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.  In contrast to this, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s (BHRRC) dataset will vary with the quality of the media/NGO reports and the aggregation of such data will require a careful coding and operationalization scheme that takes this into account. 

The ready reply is that ‘The number of potentially omitted cases decreases with the sheer volume of information captured in the BHRRC data archive … ’  However, this statement needs to be qualified, at least to a certain degree.  While the law of large numbers will improve the potential against bias, it will not resolve it completely, and a key to the reliability and usefulness of this project is to place a premium on systematic data collection to the extent possible. The authors provide an excellent first cut by providing these data to the public, but we should not assume that because of the sheer quantity of information, that these data are unbiased.

By way of a friendly amendment, what would make this data even more accessible is if the Application Programming Interface (API) itself, or a package attached to it, could pull the country names and link them to Correlates Of War  (COW) codes or other country level datasets.  In that way, the API could more readily be merged with other country level datasets like COW, World Bank and Trade data. 

As a final word, this is an exciting project that will have an enormous impact on the study of BHR in particular and human rights protection more generally. 

The article to which this post relates is available open access from the Business and Human Rights Journal here.

Professor Mark Gibney is the Carol Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.  He is also Director of the Political Terror Scale Project and has published widely in the area of international human rights law.