UK Falling Short In Enforcing Corporate Accountability In Cases Of Human Rights Abuses

According to Amnesty International, the Corporate Responsibility Coalition (CORE), and a parliamentary commission, the government needs to do more to ensure that UK businesses are held accountable for their role in human rights violations across the world where they occur. Reports have found that, though systems of accountability are in place and are clearly defined in a set of international guidelines, the body responsible for enforcing these guidelines, the UK National Contact Point (NCP), has failed in its role.

Two out of three cases of corporate malpractice and human rights violations that are reported to the NCP are rejected at the initial assessment stage. An Amnesty report published in 2016 stresses that this is due to the NCP’s systematic misinterpretation of specified guidelines on the ethical practice of businesses, leading to an imprecise system of rejection. This has resulted in an impossibly high evidential threshold and the subsequent rejection of most cases.

Furthermore, where companies have been found guilty of human rights violations, the NCP has appeared reluctant to impose adequate punishments. “Some harms,” Amnesty reports, “can be best avoided by a cessation or termination of the company’s contract to pursue an activity, but the NCP appears reluctant to make such a determination.” This is part of a wider unwillingness to addressing future threats to human rights that arise from current activities.

The UK NCP is based within the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, and was established to implement the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Designed and enforced by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Guidelines were agreed upon by 46 governments in 1976, who agreed to carry out the OECD’s mission to ‘promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world’ through the regulation of business practices. The Guidelines are internationally recognized, and, following a revision in 2011 based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a special emphasis has been placed on the protection of the human rights of labour forces and consumers alike.

It is essential that this system of accountability be carried out rigorously. Corporations can impact lives across the world and, knowingly or not, can have detrimental effects on the human rights of many. Such cases must be thoroughly investigated at the very least, and justice served where possible.

There have been many accusations of human rights violations against British businesses in recent years. For example, BT was accused of providing fiber optic cables between US military bases in the UK and Djibouti, from which drone strikes on Yemen were coordinated. These strikes were found to have adverse human rights impacts, and thus BT’s involvement in the operation was investigated.Another example involves British banks cooperating with Russian oil companies whose operations have impacted the human rights of landowners and local property owners.

UK corporations have also been in association with Kazakhstani oil firms that have violated human rights and illegally damaged the environment, as well as snooping operations by the Israeli government. Each of these cases of clear violations was presented to the NCP, but none were acted upon fully and the accused corporations have not been properly held to account.

A governmental committee responded to protests over the perceived weakness of the NCP, and in April of this year concluded that reform was needed. The resulting report highlighted an issue of under-resourcing of the NCP and also identified limited legal aid provisions and complex corporate structures as barriers to victims seeking justice.

Finally, the committee speculated that the effect of Brexit could be detrimental to the process of holding corporations to account – a claim echoed in a report compiled by CORE. As well as EU workers in the UK potentially becoming vulnerable to exploitation if Britain leaves the single market, the government must ensure that the rights of British workers and consumers are protected when the safeguards of EU law are removed. It is estimated that 13,000 pieces of regulation will be impacted by Brexit, and though they are not all related to corporate accountability, the government faces a challenge to ensure that workers and consumers are protected from corporate malpractice without EU regulations in place.

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