Business and Human Rights: A New Approach to Advancing Environmental Justice in the United States

Abstract

For years, environmental justice advocates in the United States have relied mainly on domestic regulation and litigation to advance their claims. Recently they have also scored advances by bringing complaints against the U.S. government to international human rights tribunals and treaty bodies, including the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the UN Human Rights Council. These venues have carried new hope to U.S. activists after years of discouraging outcomes in domestic courts, where strict criteria for proof of contamination or of the intent of the offending corporations to discriminate have resulted in few satisfying judgments for victims of industrial pollution. Alongside these efforts to hold the U.S. government accountable, a social movement has formed that uses the international human rights framework to address environmental degradation at its source – by insisting that polluting enterprises are responsible for complying with international human rights standards. The business and human rights (BHR) movement distinctively claims that international human rights law provides a hard legal benchmark against which companies can be judged and in accordance with which they must act, regardless of whether it is convenient, profitable, or will improve the company's reputation. BHR is conceptually distinct from another, older, and better known movement that seeks some of the same outcomes, namely corporate social responsibility (CSR). BHR insists that corporate compliance with human rights standards be legally obligatory rather than voluntary and an end in itself rather than a path to profit-making.

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