human rights

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A Regulatory Tsunami is Coming to Silicon Valley: Tech Companies Must Adopt Responsible Innovation or Risk Losing Their Competitive Edge

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was laying off its AI ethics department, joining earlier cuts of ethicists at Meta, Google, Amazon and Twitter, and thereby setting a precedent for smaller tech companies with minimal financial resources that cutting corners in ethical and humane technological advancements is acceptable. …

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John Lewis, the Mariel Cubans, and Human Rights

The concept of “human rights” is one that most educated people would likely claim to understand in a straightforward manner. Upon closer examination, however, scholars and politicians alike have engaged in fierce disagreements about its meaning and scope.…

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John Ruggie Tribute

Modest, humble, self-effacing, gentle, calm, good humored, and generous—and at the same time one of the most powerful intellects and impactful scholar-practitioners of his time: that was my experience of John Ruggie.…

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Business and Human Rights, Conflict and the Converging Legacies of Colonialism in the Palestinian Present

We cannot solve problems with the same mindset that created them. -Albert Einstein As I sit to write this post on business and human rights in relation to conflict, the Palestinian people face yet another cycle of violence in their struggle for the right to self-determination, bringing forward the academic challenge that comes with trying to detach one’s self from a personal connection to a topic.…

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The Working Group and the New Right to Coltan in International Human Rights Law

In July 2020, the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises (Working Group) issued its report, Business, human rights and conflict-affected regions: towards heightened action (A/75/212), which purports to clarify “the practical steps and outlines practical measures that States and business enterprises should take to prevent and address business-related human rights abuse in conflict and post-conflict contexts, focusing on heightened human rights due diligence and access to remedy” (p.…

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Making Rights Material

In evangelising businesses to follow the UN Guiding Principles, the business and human rights movement has weighed the advantages of wielding the ‘business case’ versus the moral case.…

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Mapping Business and Human Rights in Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern Europe has often been forgotten from business and human rights discourse. Unjustifiably so. Whereas some European countries have been the front-runners in developments in business and human rights standards, several challenges, including systematic business-related human rights abuses, have been prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).…

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Tracking COVID-19: Privacy, Health, and Private Power

Experience in several states across Europe shows that the individual sense of whether COVID-19 represents an emergency situation that requires drastic, temporary, behavioral changes and social distancing (#stayathome) appears to differ starkly and, to a certain extent, is dependent on cultural patterns of socializing.…

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The UN Settlements Database Is Out. Now What?

Following civil society organisations’ tireless efforts in Palestine and around the world, the UN Office of the High Commissioner fulfilled the mandate entrusted to it by the Human Rights Council in 2016 by recently publishing a list of 112 companies associated with Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).…

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Corporate Capture and Solidarity during Occupation: The Case of the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Corporate capture, ‘the means by which an economic elite undermine the realization of human rights and the environment by exerting undue influence over domestic and international decision-makers and public institutions,’ is a concept developed by ESCR-Net to understand the extent and mechanisms of corporate influence being exerted over State and international bodies in the modern neoliberal age.…

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Are shareholders the new champions of climate justice?

For several decades, individuals and communities affected by climate change – as well as the lawyers, advocates and civil society organizations who represent them – have been using litigation as a strategic tool to hold corporations accountable for climate change-related human rights harms.…

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Human rights in war?

Human rights in war? For many, it creates a feeling of cognitive dissonance − the mental clash that occurs in our brain when right and wrong are placed in the same category. So it does for David Petraeus, the retired US Army general and former CIA director, whose critique of humanizing warfare through human rights law has brought the question to the fore again.

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