Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Media Corporations: Incorporating Human Rights Through Rankings, Self-Regulation and Shareholder Resolutions

This article examines the emergence and evolution of selected ranking and reporting frameworks in the expanding realm of business and human rights advocacy. It explores how indicators in the form of rankings and reports evaluating the conduct of transnational corporate actors can serve as regulatory tools with potential to bridge a global governance gap that often places human rights at risk. Specifically, this article examines the relationship of transnational corporations in the Internet communications technology sector (ICT sector) to human rights and the risks presented to the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy when ICT sector companies comply with government demands to disclose user data or to conceal information users seek. Specifically, it explores the controversial role of transnational ICT corporations in state censorship and surveillance practices. The article explains how conflicts over corporate complicity in alleged abuses served to catalyze change and lead to the creation of the Global Network Initiative, a private multi-stakeholder project, and the Ranking Digital Rights Initiative, an industry independent market-based information effort. Both aim to promote more responsible business practices in the social media industry sector. In conclusion, the article argues that regulating corporate reporting of information relevant to assessing the potential for adverse human rights impacts is necessary

See No Evil? Revisiting Early Visions of the Social Responsibility of Business: Adolf A. Berle’s Contribution to Contemporary Conversations

Much corporate legal scholarship considers such fact patterns as beyond the scope of the discipline’s core concerns. Yet, increasingly, questions are asked concerning the scale and scope of modern corporate power. This Article will challenge the conventional understanding of what the core discipline of corporate law should encompass and argues that the failure to focus on precisely these sorts of factual scenarios involving allegations of corporate complicity in human rights violations and environmental degradation is misguided and short-sighted

Instructions in Inequality: Development, Human Rights, Capabilities, and Gender Violence in School

This Article argues that the international community\u27s gender equality targets will not be realized by 2015 because the problems associated with sexual violence against girls in schools are situated at an intersection of contested conceptual divides between human rights (civil and political liberties) and development aims (social and economic needs). Cracks in the conceptual foundations of both the liberal and utilitarian theories of justice and equality, which support traditional human rights advocacy and economic development plans, respectively render each approach inadequate to fully identify and address the grave danger sexual violence and harassment in schools pose to educational equality. In the end, this Article posits that development policy debates and human rights advocacy addressing the issue of gender equality in education could be advanced more constructively by the application of a capabilities approach

Instructions in Inequality: Development, Human Rights, Capabilities, and Gender Violence in School

This Article argues that the international community\u27s gender equality targets will not be realized by 2015 because the problems associated with sexual violence against girls in schools are situated at an intersection of contested conceptual divides between human rights (civil and political liberties) and development aims (social and economic needs). Cracks in the conceptual foundations of both the liberal and utilitarian theories of justice and equality, which support traditional human rights advocacy and economic development plans, respectively render each approach inadequate to fully identify and address the grave danger sexual violence and harassment in schools pose to educational equality. In the end, this Article posits that development policy debates and human rights advocacy addressing the issue of gender equality in education could be advanced more constructively by the application of a capabilities approach

See No Evil? Revisiting Early Visions of the Social Responsibility of Business: Adolf A. Berle’s Contribution to Contemporary Conversations

Much corporate legal scholarship considers such fact patterns as beyond the scope of the discipline’s core concerns. Yet, increasingly, questions are asked concerning the scale and scope of modern corporate power. This Article will challenge the conventional understanding of what the core discipline of corporate law should encompass and argues that the failure to focus on precisely these sorts of factual scenarios involving allegations of corporate complicity in human rights violations and environmental degradation is misguided and short-sighted

The Human Right to Health and HIV/AIDS: South Africa and South-South Cooperation to Reframe Global Intellectual Property Principles and Promote Access to Essential Medicines

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has had a devastating and disproportionate impact in countries of the Global South. The experience of an individual infected with HIV in Africa is very different than that of an individual infected with HIV in America. Life expectancy varies sharply. The ability or inability to access medicines essential for treatment accounts for much of the variance. This article examines how the rhetoric of human rights used in the context of South Africa\u27s AIDS crisis resonated across the Global South, resulted in a powerful social movement for access to medicines, and contributed to important changes in international intellectual property law principles. This article first introduces the competing commitments governments of the Global South face with a discussion of the current status of the global AIDS epidemic and an explanation of the structure and content of the international intellectual property and human rights legal systems. This article then provides a discussion of how domestic civil society activists organized to oppose international intellectual property interests through law and politics using the language of international human rights. Next, it presents an interpretation of how events in South Africa led to the Doha Declaration and strengthened the emerging alliance between countries of the Global South. Finally, it identifies lessons to be learned from the experience of these actors. Human Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South, Symposium, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana. 9-10 April 2010

Ranking for Good?: A Comparative Assessment of the Performance of French Corporations in Human Rights Rankings

In recent years, greater attention has been given to developing metrics that measure more than a country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Similarly, greater consideration has been given to more than just the financial performance of commercial enterprises; corporations are now expected to conduct business in ways that are responsible and sustainable, giving attention to a triple bottom line where the planet and people are prioritized along with profits. Taking French government policy and the performance of French multinational corporations as a case in point, this article explores the ways in which emerging indicators and instruments on business and human rights are relevant to the impact of business on well-being. This article examines which reporting frameworks and ranking systems best capture human rights and sustainability risks that could compromise well-being. Specifically, the article analyzes the frameworks and indicators used to measure human rights performance and the impact of rights rankings on business management. It also reviews responses by corporations to rights rankings as indicia of how measurements might be perceived as likely to result in changes in investor and consumer behavior or place brand reputation at risk

SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION

The first public speech I made was a vote of thanks. That was in 1966 to Ruth Smalley, an American Professor of Social Work speaking at Stellenbosch University in honour of the centenary celebrations. The visitor was intended to be Florence Hollis, another academic in Social Work, but Professor Hollis was not available