Money, Millennials and Human Rights: Sustaining 'Sustainable Investing'

As recently as the late 1990s, “there was no recognition that companies had human rights responsibilities,” according to Arvind Ganesan, head of business and human rights at Human Rights Watch. Today, that responsibility is increasingly recognized by global firms as well as the transnational regulatory ecosystems in which they operate. According to the Economist, the “watershed event” in gaining recognition for the corporate responsibility to respect human rights was the endorsement by the United Nations in June 2011 of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, calls the UNGPs “the global authoritative standard, providing a blueprint for the steps all states and businesses should take to uphold human rights.”