This chapter deals with the implementation of corporate human rights responsibility. It introduces human rights due diligence (HRDD) as a legal standard and managerial process. It outlines the elements of a HRDD process, consisting of the identification of human rights impacts, responding to the impacts, tracking the responses, and reporting on their effectiveness. A number of specific tools are touched on, such as human rights policy commitments, human rights impact assessments, operational-level grievance mechanisms, and human rights measurement and performance indicators. The chapter also engages with the requirement of effective remediation of negative human rights impacts. Some common implementation challenges and criticisms of HRDD are discussed. In a final step, the chapter reflects on what else corporations ought to do beyond HRDD to truly organize for human rights. Particular attention is given to fostering rights-respecting business cultures. Topics addressed in this regard range from responsible leadership to value-based recruiting practices to the importance of incentives and remuneration.

Human rights and business have long been perceived as two separate domains, with human rights considered to be a shield and protection against the abuse of governmental power. It has only been more recently that private actors such as corporations have come onto the radar of human rights scholars, while those concerned with corporations and corporate responsibility have hardly adopted a human rights perspective. Hence, bringing business and human rights together has not been intuitive for either human rights scholars or corporate responsibility researchers. Accordingly, learning “business and human rights” (BHR) actually means unlearning both business and human rights, at least to some degree. A certain taken-for-grantedness of “business as usual” often provides fertile ground for corporate human rights violations and the inadequacies of the current international legal system that provides the shield for their impunity.

This chapter outlines the evolution of BHR since the 1990s in three stages: the beginnings, the growth phase, and, finally, the time of consolidation. Before doing so, it touches on three significant precursors, which are often overlooked in more cursory historical accounts of the BHR movement. Those are the Nuremburg Trials, the activities of Western companies in apartheid South Africa, and the opposition of the local Ogoni population against oil extraction in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Furthermore, it outlines a number of BHR initiatives such as the UN Global Compact, the UN Draft Norms and the mandate of the UN Special Representative on BHR and its main product, the UN Guiding Principles on BHR (UNGPs).The chapter describes the evolution of BHR both as a movement and as an academic field.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the more common human rights violations with corporate involvement. The non-exhaustive overview aims to provide some initial insights into how corporate conduct can affect and impact human rights and to show the breadth of issues that fall under a BHR lens. Hence, the focus is on problems rather than solutions. The issues and violations dealt with are selected with a view on multinational corporations in particular. Furthermore, the selected issues are cross-cutting – that is, not specific to one particular industry. The chapter covers human rights problems relating to employment relations, corporate supply chains, affected communities, the environment, and particularly vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples or human rights defenders. Violations include discrimination, child labor, forced labor and modern slavery, and land grabbing, among others.

Corporations can be implicated in human rights violations in direct and indirect ways: Direct violations are caused by corporations through their own activities; indirect violations are caused by third parties and corporations contribute indirectly. This chapter looks in detail at this important distinction between direct and indirect human rights violations. It presents a common typology of different kinds of complicity, ranging from direct to indirect, beneficial and silent complicity. It then contrasts some legal and non-legal implications deriving from these. Before doing so, some critical reflection on terminology is provided, particularly as it pertains to the notions of human rights impacts and human rights violations.

This chapter addresses some foundational questions relating to corporate human rights accountability and clarifies the context in which different accountability regimes are embedded, paying particular attention to the rise of polycentric transnational governance in what has been called a post-Westphalian world order. The chapter distinguishes between domestic and international, private and public, and hard and soft law approaches to holding companies accountable. Particular attention is given to soft accountability mechanisms. The chapter looks at certification and labeling systems for conscious consumers, the rise of socially responsible investment or so-called ESG investment, and the effectiveness of NGO “naming and shaming” campaigns.

This chapter explores the obligations of states to hold companies accountable for their human rights impacts. It focuses squarely on the obligation of home states to increase the accountability of companies operating abroad, since the critical open questions and issues in BHR arise predominantly with regard to companies’ extraterritorial conduct. Discussions around such “home-state solutions” have become a signature feature of the BHR discussion. The chapter first takes a general conceptual look at the state duty to protect and at the state's extraterritorial obligations. It then assesses different instruments that states can use to meet such obligations in the policy, legislative, and adjudicative spaces. The discussion on legislative approaches provides an overview and assessment of different types of BHR laws with extraterritorial effects that various states have adopted in recent years. The subsection on adjudicative approaches provides a brief introduction to BHR litigation and an overview of recent seminal cases in various jurisdictions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of criticisms of such extraterritorial state measures.

Human rights have traditionally been viewed as being of concern to governments only. The BHR discussion challenges this traditional, state-centric view and provides reasons why businesses ought to have human rights responsibilities, too. Such reasons or justifications can be formulated from an ethical, legal, and even a more pragmatic, managerial point of view. From an ethical perspective, the chapter shows why businesses have obligations beyond profit-maximization and why human rights obligations are among such responsibilities. It lays particular emphasis on the power and authority of corporations as a possible foundation. From a legal perspective, the chapter addresses the question of whether multinational corporations have international legal personality and assesses to what extent corporate human rights obligations can be derived from international human rights law. From a pragmatic perspective, the social license to operate and the so-called business case for human rights responsibilty are explored. The chapter concludes with some reflections on general objections against corporate human rights responsibility.

In order to understand the key questions and issues surrounding BHR, a basic understanding of human rights more generally is necessary. Since BHR is an interdisciplinary field, it is important to gain an understanding both of the legal and non-legal dimensions of human rights. This chapter first provides a brief introduction to the philosophy of human rights and some of the key discussions that derive from this. Among them are the disputes between universalism and relativism and between foundationalist and non-foundationalist accounts of human rights. The chapter then takes a look at the main human rights bodies that institutionalize human rights in the international and regional context, paying particular attention to the United Nations’ human rights system. Finally, the chapter provides a brief introduction to international human rights law, outlining some of its key principles and instruments.