Companies have a moral obligation to act against human rights abuses, writes Geoffrey Chandler
COMPANIES will go where economic opportunity calls. In many countries – such as China, Nigeria and Colombia – opportunity occurs in the context of gross human rights violations committed by government or its security forces.
Corporate and national interest are more potent influences than moral repugnance: to seek a selective boycott or disinvestment in a world where employment and national wealth depend increasingly on the competitive exploitation of overseas opportunity would be to whistle in the wind or surrender to the least scrupulous.
Company influence is limited, but real, and readily wielded for tax or regulatory concessions. If it were used for the improvement of human rights, the world could have a powerful weapon for its betterment and companies a better climate for their investment.
But, say companies, that is not for us. Human rights are domestic politics in which we must not interfere. The business of business is business.
Well, is it? The obligations expected of companies today include care of the physical environment – though this took decades of argument and pressure. Concern for the human rights environment, however, meets with indifference or evasion.
Yet there are arguments of self-interest as well as principle that should cause rethinking in boardrooms, even if recent reports of Shell in Nigeria and British Petroleum in Colombia fail to shake corporate complacency more broadly. Abuse of human rights threatens the stability essential to long-term investment.
While such abuse stems usually from governments, there are human rights hazards inherent in a company’s own operations posing questions which any thinking company would be wise to answer in advance of encountering them.
Will companies abandon their employees arrested for some ill-defined economic crime that may in China incur the death penalty? Will they buy the products of forced or prison labour? Will they use the army or police to defend their installations, perhaps trampling human rights? Will they buy arms for their own protection without adopting international norms to avoid misuse?
All these things have happened. And if the corporate answer to these questions is Yes, how long would companies and their shareholders resist international condemnation and the damage to reputation that would ensue?
The argument of principle – that human rights transcend national boundaries and are not a matter of “domestic politics” or cultural difference – lies in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This calls on everyone – individuals and institutions – to “promote respect for” and “secure the recognition and observance of” such rights as freedom from torture and arbitrary arrest, the right to a fair trial and equality before the law. This not only legitimises companies’ right to speak out on these matters; it imposes an obligation to do so.
Today the Department of Trade and Industry in Britain delegates any problems of human rights to the Foreign Office. The Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, was silent on the issue when, in May, he led a large contingent of businessmen to China. But while government indeed has a role, it is different from that of companies which have a continuing opportunity to improve the situation.
In a series of recent advertisements Mobil argues, self-servingly, that the company should not “cut and run”. Yes indeed. It is therefore hard to see this as anything more than a smokescreen for the real immediate issue – Mobil’s failure to follow Shell’s example, however inadequate and belated, in speaking out over Nigeria where the company proclaims a significant presence.
There are, of course, companies that manufacture and trade in torture equipment or willingly see their products used for oppressive purposes. But they are the rare exception whose exposure and condemnation should not be left, as now, by the business world to the media or the voluntary sector. Business has too long shunned any central moral code or moral arbiter on any matter other than money.
To exaggerate the role or complicity of companies does no good to the cause of human rights. It would be a sad day for democracy if transnational companies really had the power their more vociferous critics attribute to them. But for companies to present themselves as impotent is to invite exaggerated ripostes.
Companies have a clear choice: to use what influence they have, or to do nothing. If they speak out they may incur the anger of government. If silent, the certain price is reputation – which is, of course, everything.
Sir Geoffrey Chandler is a former senior executive of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and architect of Shell’s first Statement of General Business Principles. He chairs Amnesty International’s UK Business Group