Chinese Multinational Companies in Africa: The Human Rights Discourse

Abstract

In this century, human rights have been transformed into a mainstream issue for multinational companies with a global presence. It is likely that a multipronged mechanism will imminently be demanded to ensure the accountability of economic actors responsible for human rights abuse. This paper places particular stress on the ostensibly prioritized objectives within international human rights arenas. A highly contentious debate revolves around whether China’s approach to ensuring human rights is in tandem with the West’s in helping Africa move forward or whether it will complicate the current playing field and even undermine the West’s long-standing credibility in relation to the protection of human rights. Relying heavily on instruments like the Alien Tort Statute (ats) has proved inadequate. A more promising path seems to be a comprehensive framework of hard law and soft law initiatives, along with other incentives.

The social value creation of MNEs – a literature review across multiple academic fields

“…The dispersal of global production activities makes it difficult to prevent human rights abuses committed abroad (Parella, 2014). Other studies investigate the effectiveness of instruments such as the Alien Tort Statute (Bu, 2015;Wu, 2001). Martin (2013) finds that there is increasing pressure on firm directors to incorporate human rights issues into their corporate governance frameworks.…”