Research: Public Opinion Is Not Enough to Hold Companies Accountable

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Customers and other stakeholders won’t always push companies to act in line with existing human rights law.

that the court of public opinion creates a reputational cost to working with governments or business partners that may have committed human rights abuses. These financial motivations are sometimes implicitly treated as a stand-in for other mechanisms — such as legal requirements — to ensure that businesses respect human rights.

To explore how the public judges different kinds of involvement in human rights violations, we asked 2,420 American adults to react to a series of hypothetical situations, yielding a total of more than 12,000 responses . All the scenarios we used would be considered unacceptable according to the United Nations’ widely recognized, and yet we found that 40% of the time, the participants in our study felt that the business had not been involved in a human rights violation.

This effect was even more pronounced if the perpetrator was a government entity.

For example, one respondent judged a company implicated in the contamination of a community’s land as not being involved in a human rights violation because they felt that the incident was “not crossing any major lines.” Similarly, another stated that “destroying a sacred site does not involve human rights,” despite the fact that this clearly violates well-established standards for cultural and indigenous rights. And even opinions that lined up with legal standards often were not framed as such.

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Legal guide lines to frame public perception seems trying to hold the wind with a fishnet. Individual self is so unpredictable which is the building block of public openion.

No they won't. Unfortunately, there is a lack of transparency - especially with smaller / mid size companies. Plus: Not every aspect is being monitored. Is misogyny an official violation of human rights, for example? Do people (aka the public) even know? It's a complex topic...

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