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Human Rights and the Moral Responsibilities of Corporate and Public Sector Organisations, Issues in Business Ethics (Vol. 20). By Tom Campbell and Seumas Miller (eds.). Kluwer, Dodrecht-Boston-London, 2004, pp. vi, 252. $139.

Reviewed by Olivier de Schutter, Professor of international and European human rights at the University of Louvain (Belgium).

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This is an ambitious collection of essays by philosophers, lawyers, social scientists and practitioners seeking to clarify the moral obligations deriving from human rights for corporations and public sector organisations, such as, in particular, the police, correctional services, or the public administration generally. Although the essays deal with a variety of issues on which the authors adopt different perspectives, the unity of the volume is ensured by a robust working hypothesis, which Chapter One (by Tom Campbell) develops. According to this hypothesis, it should be possible to identify the moral obligations of private and public organisations towards human rights by being ‘sphere specific’, that is, by devising ‘different human rights [obligations] for different types of organisation that are designed to deal with the particular problems and opportunities that arise in these different contexts’ (p. 15). In other terms, because different private and public organisations have different powers to influence the situation of human rights, by their actions as well as by their omissions, their moral obligation to respect human rights and to contribute to the promotion of human rights should be tailored to that influence.

 

The book comprises three parts, which all may be seen as elaborations on this theme. The chapters composing Part One, the most theoretical part, seek to develop this notion of ‘sphere specificity’ by linking it to the threats each actor may pose to human rights, the resources available to meet these threats, the remedies each organisation may offer, and more generally, the ability of each organisation to assist in improving the situation of human rights, including welfare rights which are the subject of Chapter Three. Part Two comprises five chapters which document and discuss the responsibilities of corporations towards human rights. These chapters discuss issues such as the rise of the ‘triple bottom line’ notion according to which companies have a responsibility that is not only financial, but also environmental and social, and the ‘drivers’ of this evolution; the tools which have emerged in recent years to regulate the activities of transnational corporations; the public interest justifications for the form of the corporation and the duties of the corporations towards all its stakeholders and to the general public; or the duty of the corporation to consult and negotiate with those who are affected by its activities, in order to identify what requirements should be seen as deriving from human rights in the concrete settings in which they are perceived as relevant. Finally, Part Three contains four chapters discussing the public sector responsibilities towards human rights: these responsibilities are not only illustrated through concrete examples such as the military exercizing policing functions in occupied zones, correctional organisations, or the police, but they are also discussed at a more theoretical level, through the notion of the ‘administrative evil’, where the tasks are so rigidly segmented and compartmentalized that each individual fails to see his or her moral responsibility in the final outcome of the collective action – a concept most brilliantly evoked by Hannah Arendt’s 1962 Report on the Banality of Evil : Eichmann in Jerusalem (although she is incredibly absent from Chapter Eleven where this concept is discussed).

 

While it offers interesting insights into the philosophical arguments which may justify the imposition of human rights responsibilities on companies and other private and public organisations commensurate to the importance they have taken in our everyday lives, the book fails to connect these arguments to the current debate concerning which legal obligations should be imposed, and through which means, on corporations. This may be explained, in part, by the time lag between the writing of the different chapters and the final publication of the book : the book originated in a seminar held late in 2000, and most chapters contain few references after 2002, or at best 2003. Although the editors can hardly be faulted for this, this may be a problem in an area such as corporate social responsibility which is continuously evolving. More worrying, however, may be the fact that the focus of the book is explicitly on ‘moral’ aspects of human rights, beyond their ‘legal’ dimensions, as the editors seem to share an – outmoded – understanding of human rights as exclusively addressed to sovereign States. Apart from the fact that it makes no more sense to distinguish public organisations such as the military, the police, or correctional services from the State, than to separate what my left hand is doing from what may be imputed to me, this flawed presentation of legally binding human rights as binding only on States is a missed opportunity. The notions of ‘complicity’ and ‘sphere of influence’ (both of which should serve to identify the scope of the responsibility of corporations towards human rights) have predictably become central to the discussion on the follow-up to the ‘Norms and Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with regard to Human Rights’ adopted by the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in August 2003 (a development which P. Muchlinski briefly refers to in Chapter Five). The relevancy to these current discussions of the philosophical arguments which compose most of the book could have been more explicit and, indeed, led to translating these arguments into more concrete policy proposals, had the editors not adhered to this outmoded understanding of human rights as legal obligations. T. Campbell ends his introduction with a disclaimer that the ‘sphere specificity’ approach to human rights should not be seen as ‘threaten[ing] the underlying objectives of human rights movements by discounting the centrality of legally enforceable universal rights by and against states’ (p. 8). He may be reassured. It is not the discounting of this understanding of human rights which activists have reasons to fear. Rather, what they may fear is the reaffirmation that human rights may impose legally binding norms on States, but are degraded into moral obligations when applied to other actors. This volume does little to assuage us on this point.