Corporate accountability

What is corporate accountability?

Corporate accountability is a growing movement to hold companies accountable for violations of human rights. This accountability can take the form of criminal, administrative, or civil liability mechanisms where victims of human rights abuses can access justice.

Corporate accountability derives from the idea that corporate actors have a responsibility to respect and promote human rights throughout their entire supply chain, meaning throughout the network of people and other entities involved from the extraction and sourcing of raw materials to the creation and distribution of the final product.

This concept was developed in the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. While non-binding, the Guiding Principles provide a widely-accepted framework for addressing responsible business practices.

The framework articulates three overarching core principles: 1. governments have the duty to protect against abuses of human rights, including by companies, by implementing measures to prevent, investigate, punish, and rectify such abuses; 2. businesses should avoid violating persons’ human rights and should undertake to address any harmful human rights effects that they cause; and 3. governments must provide access to effective remedies for those impacted by human rights abuses.

In line with the third principle, corporate accountability aims to break the impunity that corporate actors have enjoyed over the past several decades, even as they exploited child labor, employed violence against their workers, violated land rights and displaced communities, and polluted surrounding environments, to list a few examples.

Holding companies accountable largely takes place domestically, where specific laws enable victims or the government to bring suit not just against individuals associated with the company, but the company itself, for violations of human rights.