Personhood

'Vesting the Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights: Natural Persons v Legal Persons' by Malcolm Rogge in Oonagh Fitzgerald (ed) Corporate Citizen: New Perspectives on the Globalized Rule of Law (CIGI-McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) comments

 The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights state that respecting human rights is a corporate responsibility. Rather than asking what it means for a corporation ‘to respect’ human rights, the author examines the term ‘corporate responsibility’ and considers its ethical significance for the corporate decision maker and human rights victim alike. The article describes how the transnational legal order does not adequately capture human rights in legal terms as an aspect of corporate responsibility; indeed, the legal order tends to leave the victim facing an accountability void. The global governance ‘gap’, as this void is often called, is shown here to be constitutive of the global legal order, rather than something absent from it. Given this lamentable situation, it is argued that primacy should be given to natural persons over legal persons in our conception of corporate responsibility. As ethical responsibility, the corporate responsibility for human rights is vested in the natural persons who govern the corporate entity. Such a reconfiguration of corporate responsibility does not detract from multi-pronged efforts to hold corporations legally accountable for violations of human rights; complementing such efforts, it provides reasons for reflective decision makers to choose to govern the legal entities that they control in ways that uphold human rights rather than circumvent them. Today, corporate responsibility – as the ethical responsibility of natural persons – runs all the way from decision makers in the lowest-level subsidiary to the apex of the multinational corporate group.