The Highs and Lows of the UK's Business and Human Rights Laws

an article by Anna Dannreuther and Hayley Chapman for Rightsinfo June 2017

Today [16 June 2017] marks 6 years since the UN Human Rights Council adopted the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. To celebrate, we are looking at three fantastic things the UK has done to ensure that businesses respect human rights, and two areas where it could vastly improve.

But first, a bit of background…

The dramatic expansion of international commercial activity over the past 50 years has put the issue of human rights in business firmly on the global policy agenda. This explosion in cross-border activity led to the emergence of ‘governance gaps’, where corporations found that their operations were less strictly regulated in some countries than others – creating a “permissive environment for wrongful acts”. As a result, there was a string of human rights violations involving business during the 90s and early 2000s, including the Nike sweatshop allegations, the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill, and the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh.

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There’s lots of links to corroborating data some of which, obviously, will not make pleasant reading.

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