Human Rights Corporate Accountability Guide: From Laws to Norms to Values

In order to be held to account for its impact on human rights, a company must internalize human rights principles into the shared values - embraced at all of its levels - that drive its businesses on a day to day basis. Shared values comprise a company’s culture, which may or may not always align with its stated goals. Ensuring a robust corporate culture that supports and respects human rights is critical to preventing business-related human rights abuses

To achieve this culture, a company should take an integrated approach. First, the company must understand what the law forbids (e.g., directly abusing human rights and being complicit in human rights abuses by others) and what the law requires (e.g., identifying, mitigating, and reporting upon risk).

Second, the company must take into account so-called soft law arising from the growing international web of multi-stakeholder initiatives and public and private codes and norms. Although these norms are technically voluntary, they have significant bite in practice, as a result of the absence of a centralized command-and-control system of international law. This has been characterized as a new “law merchant,” so named for self-regulatory rules and principles based on usages and customs that medieval European merchants followed in order to fill in the gaps created by what was, at the time, an unresponsive civil law.

Finally, the company must internalize these internal and external standards by living up to their letter and spirit. This requires sound management and authentic leadership, resulting in the adoption of human rights values as core corporate values that manifest themselves in day-to-day actions. The adoption of such values requires a company to take the following steps, at minimum: