Zusammenfassung
Human rights have traditionally been considered a domain of governments. The ongoing economic globalization, however, has rendered this state-centered view increasingly inadequate. In this contribution we will argue that also the powerful transnational corporations must bear more and more direct responsibility for the impact of their actions on human rights. Florian Wettstein and Sandra Waddock will first clarify the conceptual connection between existing approaches to corporate citizenship (CC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the newly emerging "business and human rights" debate. Partly in contradiction to the "traditional" view on CSR/CC as a voluntary affair for business, we will then plea for mandatory human rights standards for corporations. However, human rights obligations are not always clear-cut and evident; especially so-called positive rights often create contingent and often highly ambiguous duties for many different actors.
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Auszug
Voluntary or Mandatory: That Is (Not) the Question*: Linking Corporate Citizenship to Human Rights Obligations for Business
1. Business and human rights: the traditional view
Ever since corporations began operating as autonomous institutions, they have been under critical scrutiny regarding their impact on people and the society at large. At the turn of the 20th century massive abuse of corporate power culminated in equally powerful counter-movements distinctly aimed at enforcing and strengthening worker's rights. In the second half of the 20th century, the first systematic theoretical approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate citizenship (CC), and related approaches with similar intent emerged. While initially well embedded in the Keynesian beliefs and certainties, such approaches became an important counterweight as neoclassical economic theories re-gained momentum along with the rise of the neoliberal ideology after 1973. Both approaches - CSR and CC - however, have at best implicitly referred to human rights but seldom placed a primary and systematic focus on them. Accordingly, there are only just a handful of early attempts to shed light on the relation of business to human rights; most commonly these early approaches adopted a rather narrow and exclusive focus on the most evident rights-issue in regard to business: labor rights (e.g. Werhane 1985).There is an evident explanation as to why human rights have not played a major role in determining the role of business in society; for almost 50 years after the UN Declaration of Human Rights took effect in 1948 there was a widespread consensus that states are the exclusive and only bearers of obligations deriving from the Declaration. As the absolute center of societal organization and power the state was not only regarded as the primary institution to guarantee the realization of human rights as well as to prevent other institutions from violating them; at the same time it was itself considered the primary threat with respect to their violation. Precisely because of its superior capacity and the accumulation of power in state institutions, the last aspect seemed of superior moral importance; the primary focus of human rights protection was traditionally laid on the prevention of direct human rights violations through state institutions (Pogge 1998: 381). As a result, there was a bias toward regarding human rights as an issue of only minor concerns to business; corporations were ...Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes
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