Business Perspectives on Corporate Accountability for Human and Environmental Rights Violations

The past twenty years have witnessed a multiplication of legislative initiatives, civil and criminal litigations, and concerted demands by social movements and NGOs across the world to hold economic actors accountable for human rights violations and environmental degradation. An important body of literature has examined these civil society mobilizations, and the ways governments envisage similar processes. Yet we know far less about the ways businesses understand their own rights and duties as legal persons, and their responsibilities as citizen. This conference aims to revisit the current academic scholarship on corporate accountability by providing a platform for socio-historical analysis of the variety of business actors and their (potentially fragmented and competing) ideas, strategies, and lines of action in terms of enhancing or undermining concrete responsibility for human rights violations and ecological degradation.