Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability, Erika George (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Abstract

A lot has happened since 2005, when the late John Ruggie was appointed as the UN Special Representative on human rights and transnational corporations.Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have continued to grow, despite concerns about their limited accomplishments. NGOs have developed a variety of score cards to rank the human rights and sustainability practices of leading brands and retailers. ESG (environmental, social and governance) ratings have moved into themainstreamof the investmentworld, spurring debates aboutwhether they are meaningful and ‘material’ to corporate returns. Recently, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – which Ruggie helped to forge – have inspired an EU draft directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, moving towards mandatory rather than voluntary standards. In Incorporating Rights, Erika George makes a hopeful argument about how these types of initiatives – particularly the voluntary ones – can gradually lead to greater respect for the human rights of workers in labour-intensive industries, communities in extractive zones, and individuals subject to high-tech surveillance. While occasionally acknowledging limitations, she argues that MSIs, score cards and demand from responsible investors and consumers have combined to make attention to human rights essentially obligatory rather than voluntary for large corporations. This is especially significant, she argues, because international law offers few meaningful paths for corporations to be held accountable to human rights norms, especially as courts have narrowed the scope of extra-territorial claims. In essence, George carries on Ruggie’s legacy in making the case that norms for international business are changing and that this is no small accomplishment. Empirically, George traces the discourse of corporate social responsibility in several large food/beverage, apparel/footwear, oil/gas and information technology companies (e.g., Coca-Cola, Adidas, ExxonMobil and Microsoft). Looking over time, she shows that human rights were increasingly incorporated into policies and reports as the companies faced controversies (roughly 2005 to 2017 in most cases). Beyond this, George draws on her observations of various meetings (e.g., UN Annual Forum on Business and Human Rights) and interviews with developers of MSIs and score cards to paint a multi-faceted portrait of the expectations that large companies face to respect human rights throughout their global operations and supply chains. In each chapter, she examines a different piece of the puzzle – such as business and human rights norms, MSIs, score cards, shareholder and consumer pressures – highlighting the evolution and expansion of expectations. Her analysis ends prior to the development of the EU mandatory due diligence directive – and earlier laws, such as the French Corporate Duty of Vigilance law, are not in her purview – but these developments would seemingly bolster her overall point: global human rights have become institutionalized as part of the ‘social license to operate’ for large transnational corporations.