- Profesor: Dorothée Baumann-Pauly
Course Description
Headlines connecting multinational companies and human rights challenges occur with increasing frequency. Particularly in the global business context and in countries in which governments are unable or unwilling to guarantee basic rights for their citizens, corporations are regarded as the only actors that have the power and the resources to prevent or stop gross human rights violations.
Against this background, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed a set of Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in June 2011. The Guiding Principles (GPs) establish an authoritative global standard on the respective roles of businesses and governments in helping ensure that companies respect human rights in their own operations and through their business relationships.
The GPs create a new business reality. Corporations need to figure out what their commitment to respect Human Rights implies in practice and how they can systematically build 'respect' for Human Rights into their daily business operations. In this course we will study examples of how corporations can define universal human rights standards for their industry, enforce these standards, and remedy violations of these standards. We will also discuss how corporations can communicate their practical and sustained action to consumers and investors.
Course Objectives
The objective of this course is to equip students with skills to identify, analyze and resolve corporate human rights challenges.
The course capacitates students to be problem solvers, even on the toughest human rights challenges. It develops students' leadership potential on human rights issues by discussing case studies and frameworks for effectively addressing business and human rights problems in different industries.