This article considers the practices of companies worldwide in attempting to implement human rights due diligence (HRDD) as envisaged by the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Based on empirical research conducted through surveys and interviews, it analyses corporate practices in this area. It examines the responses of companies with reference to the core elements of implementing HRDD: identifying actual or potential human rights impacts; taking action to address these impacts; and tracking or monitoring the effectiveness of actions. In addition, the article places these practices in the context of the legal developments in the field of HRDD. The research shows the difference that dedicated HRDD – in comparison with non-human rights specific processes – can make in terms of identifying adverse human rights impacts of both the company as well as of those which are part of its business relationships.

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights endorse a risk management perspective of human rights due diligence, which may create ambiguities with regard to the nature of risk and the objectives of risk management. By ‘human rights risk’ we understand a business enterprise’s potential adverse human rights impacts. Human rights risk can be contrasted to an enterprise’s ‘social risk’ which refers to the actual and potential leverage that people or groups of people with a negative perception of corporate activity have on the business enterprise’s value.

This article puts forward the argument that due diligence in respect of human rights risk is conceptually incompatible with the management of social risk, because social risk management and human rights due diligence vary at each step of the risk management process (risk identification, risk measurement and assessment, risk reduction measures). To resolve this incompatibility, an effective integration of human rights due diligence processes into corporate risk management systems would require an elevation of human rights respect to a corporate goal that determines corporate strategy.

How do companies understand and talk about human rights? Do they consider human rights a moral, legal or political construct? What type of responsibility do they assume in respect of human rights (e.g., direct/indirect, narrow/broad)? Is the language and label of human rights used within day-to-day practice? This article attempts to address these questions by drawing on empirical data collected as part of an in-depth, qualitative study on the development of human rights within 22 UK companies. Through an analysis based on sensemaking, the article explores the meaning of human rights, the grounds used to justify corporate responsibility, and the human rights terminology and labels employed within the corporate setting. It then analyses what this understanding and discourse means for the debate about the role of private entities for the protection of human rights.

This article utilizes the struggles for land rights associated to two sugar cane investments in Cambodia to reflect on the interactions between the multi-territoriality of supply chain capitalism and the multiplication of local spaces of legal intervention. With a combination of legal institutionalism, critical geography and value chains analysis, the article engages with value chains as the new space and form of the global system of production and looks at the theoretical and practical implications that derive from delocalization, outsourcing and the establishment of transnational networks that cut across boundaries and jurisdictions. After discussing the human rights impact of large-scale sugar production in the Koh-Kong region, the article introduces a critical legal chain approach to unpack and make visible the material and legal threads that connect Cambodia with multiple geographies around the world. In its last part, it utilizes the multi-territorial character of production to map its complexity and introduce the notion of ‘legal chokeholds’. These are legal structures and spaces of intervention that can be leveraged by human rights scholars, activists and other actors interested in re-defining the way in which rights, bargaining power and value are distributed through the chain of production. The violations and possible defence of the land rights that occurred in Cambodia are thus presented as output of non-linear interactions between legal and non-legal elements that operate at a distance, often unaware of each other.

Human rights have come to play a prominent role in debates about the responsibilities of business. In the business ethics literature, there are two approaches to the question of whether businesses have human rights obligations. The ‘moral’ approach conceives of human rights as antecedently existing basic moral rights. The ‘institutional’ approach starts with contemporary human rights practice in which human rights refer to rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international documents, and in which states are the primary duty bearers of human rights. This commentary argues that the implications of adopting one or the other approach are much greater than most scholars recognize, and that we have reason to reject the moral approach and to adopt the institutional approach instead. The commentary highlights key questions that need to be addressed if human rights are to play a central role in framing the responsibilities of business.

In a series of previous articles I have defended the claim that there are robust, theoretical justifications for concluding that corporations have human rights obligations and that those obligations are distinct from the larger set of human rights obligations that are properly attributed to states. Hsieh claims that corporations do not have human rights obligations. In this reply it is argued that even if one takes what Hsieh refers to as an ‘institutional approach’ to understanding the human rights obligations of states, corporations are nonetheless properly understood to have human rights obligations regarding those with whom they interact, such as workers, customers and community members.