Business and Human Rights: Explaining Variation in Justice and Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Violations

University Of Denver, Denver CO

Investigators

Abstract

Claims of corporate human rights abuse are ubiquitous. Despite widespread interest on this topic on the part of scholars, businesses, states, international bodies, and human rights groups, no systematic cross-national study yet exists to document claims of corporate human rights abuse. This project will create the first, global database of human rights abuses by businesses and related remedy or justice efforts - the Business and Human Rights Database (BHRD) - to better understand how firm-, state-, and global-level factors shape the likelihood of abuse and access to remedy for such abuses, when they do occur. Understanding when and where abuses are likely to occur and how victims, states, and corporations respond to such claims is important for a) advancing the business and human rights scholarship by building on a successful pilot project; b) influencing policy debates by providing systematic data, rather than a small number of well-known incidents; and c) inspiring the next generation of human rights scholars. In addition to the scholarly contribution, the project will produce two tools,an interactive, searchable BHRD website and a BHRD Index, the latter tracks company-level human rights performance over time. These tools will ensure a broader impact and will inform best practices by allowing academic, policy, practitioner, and business researchers to easily access the data for their own purposes. Why do claims of corporate human rights abuses emerge? And, why do some claims achieve remedy for those abuses while others do not? Drawing on related streams of literature from human rights, political science, and management scholarship, this research employs a multilevel analysis that seeks to understand when and where victims make their claims known and why such claims are addressed through judicial or non-judicial remedy processes in some cases and not others. This research project is comprised of four phases. First, building on a successful pilot project of corporate human rights abuses in Latin America, the team will complete a global Business and Human Rights Database between 2006 and 2018. Using a unique coding tool, the BHRD team will systematically collect publicly available information about the type of abuse (when, where, and what type of abuse), firm- and state-level responses (content of response, from whom), and access to remedy efforts for the claim (judicial and/or non-judicial remedy), if any. Second, this database will allow the PI to test hypotheses about business-related human rights abuses and access to remedy to fill important theoretical gaps in the business and human right scholarship. Third, the PI and her team will use existing networks to disseminate scholarly and policy papers to academic, governmental and business groups. The final phase will ensure the project's broader impact, by launching a searchable, interactive website to make the global BHRD user-friendly and widely accessible and developing a BHRD Index so that interested parties can track firms' human rights record. The PI will also seek to inspire and train a new generation of human rights scholars and practitioners. Ultimately, the long-term goal of this project is to reduce corporate human rights abuses and improve access to remedy when abuses do occur. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.