Environmental activist and indigenous leader Berta Cáceres – who in 2015 was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize – was assassinated in Honduras one year later, in 2016, for leading a protest against a hydroelectric power dam. The dam was promoted at that time by a joint venture between the Honduran company DESA (Desarrollos Energéticos, S.A.), the Chinese company Sinohydro and other financial partners. Her life is one of hundreds that, each year, is brutally taken for actions meant to protect human and environmental rights. Over the period 2015 to 2020, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) documented over 2,400 attacks launched against human rights defenders fighting in conflicts involving the business sector; while the United Nations reported that, from 2017 to 2018, there were 431 confirmed killings of human rights defenders. Defenders can tackle different kinds of abuses, some focus on land and environmental rights that are at risk of being undermined by business operations, and which can in turn also damage fundamental rights like the right to life or to live in a safe environment.  

These violations are committed by both State actors (often through the military) as well as non-State actors, including businesses (who often rely on security guards or hitmen to perpetrate the abuses, or use their lawyers to file strategic lawsuits to silence or intimidate defenders). In 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders reported that “the overwhelming majority of human rights violations committed against human rights defenders remain unpunished” while, many defenders are stigmatized and become the victims of State- or corporate-led smear campaigns, and accused of being “terrorists”, “spoilers of peace” or “enemies of the government”.

According to my own calculations based on BHRRC data, 95.5% of the human rights defender attacks occur in a low to middle income country, with highest prevalence in Latina America and  Africa.  Roughly one-third (36%) of the observable companies associated with the attacks (solely or jointly) are headquartered in high-income countries¸ while the remaining attacks (64%) are from lower income country firms.

As attention to these attacks on human rights defenders has been growing, so too have the calls for changes in corporate practice and accountability. Interest has been increasing in how Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are addressing human rights responsibilities and incorporating (or not) human rights policies in their strategies (see e.g. Wettstein et al., 2019; Fiaschi et al., 2017; Whiteman and Cooper, 2016; Crane, 2014), it is less clear how – either in words or practice – they are managing interactions with human rights defenders. Other important questions are how home countries, host countries, and other actors such as shareholders under different corporate structures and governance systems shape corporate practices and outcomes in this area.

It would be desirable if national or supra-national legislations incorporated explicit provisions on human rights defenders as part of the mandatory human rights due diligence laws. Some countries have already taken steps to introduce legislation requiring companies operating in their jurisdictions to perform human rights due diligence (as in the case of the 2017 France Loi du Vigilance or the Dutch Child Labour Due Diligence Act of 2019). In addition, a EU-wide human rights and environmental due diligence law is in the making and it indeed constitutes a timely opportunity for thinking about how human rights defenders can be ensured greater protection and access to justice, but also how they can be more explicitly included in the monitoring part of the due diligence process. Among other things, this will empower them and award them greater legitimacy.

Mandatory requirements are even more important given that companies do not yet seem to have taken voluntary steps to seriously tackle the human rights defenders issue. Some companies, which had to face allegations for their involvement in attacks to human rights defenders have ad hoc policies or statements as part of their human rights policy. Yet, having a policy on human rights defenders does not per se imply that there will not be attacks. Coca Cola, for instance revised its human rights policy in 2017 to engage more fully with human rights defenders, but intimidation practices against unionists at Coca Cola plants have been reported in 2018 and 2020.

Firms from lower income countries, where these attacks are more frequent, seem to have so far almost neglected the issue. According to a new study I am conducting on a sample of 245 Forbes Global 2000 companies from Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Thailand, where I have analysed over 2,600 CSR or Annual Reports produced by these companies between 2000-2018 – human rights defenders are mentioned only in one report by Vale S.A. in 2018.  Despite these discouraging numbers, I expect to see this topic rising in some of the emerging market firms, in particular for emerging market MNEs with investments in countries characterized by strong speech and press freedoms. In an earlier study I conducted with colleagues at the Responsible Management Research Center of the University of Pisa, we find that Brazilian and Mexican multinationals are less likely to abuse human rights, the more intensively they invest in countries with high speech and press freedoms, where any evidence of human rights infringements get broadcasted and given resonance, thus undermining their sought-after legitimacy. Hence, my hope is that these kinds of multinationals will take the lead in addressing the human rights defenders issue – not necessarily because this is a giant problem in their home country, but because they will have to face greater international scrutiny on this. This is even more important given the legal risk and pressure from current and anticipated regulatory changes in the business and human rights field.

My guess is that there will be growing attention to human rights defenders by the press and watchdog organizations in the near future because attacks to defenders have a unique powerful characteristic: they give a face and a name to the victim(s), who stand out for their moral value and courage. They risk their lives to defend the rights to land, life, labour and health of their communities. Thus, should human rights defenders become more central in the (press or NGOs) narratives about business-related human rights abuses, CEOs (and possibly other corporate leaders) will need to play a  bigger role in facing the risks associated with this kind of victims.

In the US and Europe we see already the emergence of CEO activism, a phenomenon by which CEOs take the stage to speak out against the apparent aberrations of our times – often concerning hot issues in their home countries such as LGBTQ+ rights and racism. Yet, with human rights defenders the victims are even closer because, either legally or morally, these individuals are likely to fall into the responsibility of CEOs and executives. Hence, it seems to me that companies – including through their leadership – will need to be better equipped to respond to this issue and to find better ways to face people that have been attacked, raped, tortured or killed for supporting a seemingly just cause. To conclude, my view is that this a new promising area of research that can develop at three interconnected levels: the level of national and supra-national regulation; the level of MNEs voluntary policies across different regions and countries; and the individual level, through CEO responses to human rights defenders and the related ways that this shapes a new corporate culture on human rights.

Elisa Giuliani is Professor of Management and Director of the Responsible Management Research Center at the University of Pisa.

For more on this and related topics from the Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ) see BHRJ articles ‘Protecting Human Rights Defenders: A Critical Step Towards a More Holistic Implementation of the UNGPs’ and ‘Business, Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Security in the Case Law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’