Mapping the public/private-law divide: a hybrid approach to corporate accountability

Abstract

Images of oil-covered seabirds or radioactive fallout from nuclear disasters easily evoke concerns over the risks to personal integrity and environmental degradation. The energy-extraction industry, like others, is profit-driven – a competitive enterprise, with little regard for the social impact of its activities beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) rhetoric. CSR is neither a precautionary measure nor a remedial framework. Outsider stakeholder influence from government is limited and CSR is written on companies’ terms. What emerges is a distortion between companies’ responsibility and accountability for breaches. We propose a hybrid form of accountability that incorporates public international law to ensure the state, as a guardian of society, plays a more definitive role. This will require more binding obligations on states and companies beyond the current soft-law principles, to curtail jurisdictional constraints and forum shopping of large corporations, through an international court of reparations to guarantee effective remedies for victims.

The Politics of Localizing Human Rights: Chinese Policies and Corporate Practices in Latin America

“…Without the complement of stricter national legal obligations, this privatized voluntary process cannot be more effective than other voluntary self-regulation regimes. 43 In this context, victims use civil and criminal remedies in national systems. 44 In fact, allegations of human rights violations committed by a corporation should be in principle addressed by the host country where business is conducted, a duty that has national and international sources.…”

Mapping corporate social responsibility practices at the international level: systematic review and content analysis approach

“…Driven by the attraction of cheaper production opportunities, corporations increasingly turned their attentions toward developing countries (Bae et al , 2021; Nolan, 2017; Ruggie, 2017). It was not long before reports of exploitive and harmful business practices shocked consumers the world over (Hackett and Moffett, 2016; Ullah et al , 2021). Unfortunately, attempts by the international community to control the behavior of these multinational corporations (MNCs) through international law proved unenforceable, and repeated attempts to homogenize obligations across all nations were unfeasible (Bair, 2015).…”

“…Many MNCs created individual codes of conduct for themselves, to appease their customers’ demands for formal CSR commitments (Berger‐Walliser and Scott, 2018; Tamvada, 2020). However, commentators soon began to question the implementation and overall impact of this self-regulation (Bae et al , 2021; Hackett and Moffett, 2016). While some suspected that these codes were nothing but lip service (Lebaron et al , 2017), others were concerned with the applicability of code elements (Tamvada, 2020).…”