This blog post by Dr Tara Van Ho is the first in a series of blog pieces by describing a change or changes the writer would like to see in any part of the field of business and human rights. 

I have long been a proponent of the practical and pragmatic nature of Business & Human Rights academia. Our grounded and focused academics have helped advance thinking on due diligence, BHR in conflict, and remediation that are having real-world consequences.

But academics also have a role to play in being unrealistic – in being more creative and imaginative than our civil society, state, or business allies.

In this post, published to coincide with the annual meeting of the Global Business & Human Rights Scholars Association, I set out a 5-point research agenda for the future of the field. This is not necessarily my agenda—as I admit below, I’m not even qualified to address some of this—but research needed in and by the field.

1. Politically impractical but legally sound and necessary ideas

The UN Forum on Business and Human Rights has slipped into a strange choreography:

NGOs, rights-holders, and academics come and plead: “Our people are dying; please help us.” 

States and businesses reply “We hear you. We’re committed to human rights. But, you’re asking too much too fast. Slow down. Give us more time. We’re sorry people will die but we can’t possibly do more, at least not while there’s money to be made.”

Okay, they don’t really say that final clause out loud, but it is implicit.

I am tired—and I mean literally, physically exhausted—from watching this dance each year.

The UNGPs were the compromise academics and NGOs accepted to appease states and businesses. We cannot afford to cede more ground. 

Unfortunately, our politically pragmatic asks have broadly aligned with the bare minimum needed to comply with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). In turn, states and businesses have treated the minimum expectations in the UNGPs as the maximum they are willing to do; an opening offer in a decades-long negotiation.

If we want to change the discussion, we need bold, politically unsound ideas to shift both the left and the centre of current debates from “in the next 10 years, we intend to stop killing people” to something akin to real respect for human rights. Political feasibility be damned. 

Our unique ability to spend time on issues other stakeholders can’t is why academics should be driven not just by the practical, present-driven issues but also the field’s future. 

2. The Responsibility of Auditors and ESG Evaluators

Speaking of the field’s future, we need to focus attention on those shaping BHR practice now: ESG regulators and social auditors.

Auditors and evaluators have been setting their own agenda and recent decisions by ESG leader Morningstar indicate that at least some care little about complying with the UNGPs.

We need to professional standards of competency and accountability for social auditors and ESG evaluators. Carolijn Terwindt argued that social auditors (should) have an existing duty of care under English tort law. Marisa McVey, writing alone and with John Ferguson and François-Régis Puyou, has more broadly analysed concerns about the role of external experts in advising on BHR.

But Dr McVey cannot carry this agenda out on her own. I would like to see others build upon her research and ensure its practical application. 

3. Traditional Media’s BHR Responsibility

Facebook’s contribution to the Rohingya genocide has spurred academic research into the BHR responsibilities of social media companies. Yet, we are missing significant work on the BHR responsibility of traditional news media.

In a recent, open-access article, Dr Dimitrios Akrivos tackled the UK news media’s responsibility when reporting on trans rights. The way in which reporters and media cover complex issues raising conflicts between rights is an important one that BHR should analyse and inform. Yet, Dr Akrivos did not use BHR in his interrogation and UK media law is more well-developed than the law in other states.

To my knowledge, the only piece that directly uses BHR to consider the responsibility of traditional news media is Sarah Joseph’s ground-breaking 2016 piece, “Is Fox News a Breach of Human Rights?” 

Yet, Professor Joseph could not tackle all the issues needed when considering the BHR responsibilities of new media. Future research should build upon Professor Joseph’s and Dr Akrivos’s work to analyse traditional media’s BHR responsibilities. For example, what would it look like to employ HRDD when reporting on highly politicised issues that are also fundamentally human rights concerns, like refugees in southern Europe or trans rights in the US and UK? 

Addressing this issue well will require interdisciplinary inputs from psychology, sociology, media law and business ethics and requires thinking through the media’s long-term impacts. Doing it right can be transformative.

4. Due Diligence with Long-term Harms

Thinking through the media’s long-term responsibility relates to a broader issue of long-term (and sometimes indirect) harms arising from how a company impacts others in a particular context or society.

A consultant once told me that companies can carry out good human rights due diligence processes in conflict-affected areas without taking into account how the business relates to the conflict itself.

This is not true.

But the conversation reflects a broader problem in that businesses do not understand that respecting human rights is not just about the immediate harms they cause or contribute to but about the long-term impacts of their actions and relationships.

Greater work is needed to tease out what is expected of businesses when considering the long-term, and perhaps less direct, impacts from their activity. More importantly, consideration is needed as to how we integrate that expectation into law and practice. This work will take the kind of time and research that generally other stakeholders cannot dedicate to this question, which is why academics need to create space for this issue.

5. Queering BHR

Finally, we need critical approaches to law and practice to help us better understand the promise and limits of BHR and the UNGPs.

Some of that work has started. Sarah Seck, Caroline Omari Lichuma, Omo Oyeniyi Abe, and Aaron Dhir have each employed Third World Approaches of International Law in the context of BHR. Considerations on the limits of BHR have been raised by: Melisa Handl and Penelope Simons using a feminist critique;  Erika George, Jena Martin and I through a dialogue grounded in critical race theory; and Grietje Baars’s Marxist interrogation of the corporation and capitalism.

Each of these critical approaches to BHR deserves further scholarship.

Notably missing, however, is a Queering of BHR.

Gabriel Coutinho Galil, Rafael Carrano Lelis, and Paola Durso Angelucci in one article and Amanda Lyons and Cooper Christiancy in another have addressed BHR’s relationship to LBGTQ+ rights and discrimination. Dr Baars’s utilised and built upon queer theory as part of their Marxist critique.

But we could benefit from a more sustained queer interrogation of BHR. As Gráinne de Búrca summarised, queer theories can be used to interrogate and disrupt “hierarchies, binaries, and ‘understandings of what is “normal.”’

What would a queer approach to BHR reveal?

I am honestly not sure—but I am really excited to learn!

The editorial board of the Business and Human Rights Journal welcomes submissions that extend the reach and depth of the field.

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