Moving Beyond the Corporate Responsibility to Respect? Exploring the Human Rights Obligations of Businesses

Date: March 3, 2014 12:10pm – 1:00pm
Location: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall, Room 807

The Center and Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights hosted a brown-bag lunch talk and discussion with David Bilchitz on “Moving Beyond the Corporate Responsibility to Respect? Exploring the Human Rights Obligations of Businesses.”

This presentation provided three important challenges to the current UN ‘”Respect, Protect and Remedy” Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Bilchitz argued that corporations already do have binding legal obligations in relation to fundamental rights, that these obligations are not simply matters of social expectations and that corporations have positive obligations that go beyond merely a responsibility to avoid harm.

David Bilchitz is Professor, Human Rights and Constitutional Law, University of Johannesburg; Director, SA Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law; Secretary-General, International Association of Constitutional Law; and co-editor of The Human Rights Obligations of Business (Cambridge, 2014).