Contextualising the Business Responsibility to Respect: How Much Is Lost in Translation

Abstract

This chapter is to understand why and under what conditions this loss or watering down is likely to arise, and how regulatory standards for business and human rights might be designed to enable the responsibility to respect principle to be applied in context-sensitive ways, without losing regulatory force. The complex and politically contested reasons why overarching regulatory principles can get "lost in translation" when applied in practice have important implications for understanding how the corporate responsibility to respect can be meaningfully implemented across widely varying regulatory contexts. Translation of business responsibilities from principle to practice involves at least two steps. The first step is from internationally recognised human rights to guidelines or standards detailing corresponding business responsibilities. The second is the translation of the principles as found in the guidelines into everyday practice. Keywords:business responsibilities; context-sensitive standards; regulatory principles; translation