Corporate-led women’s empowerment initiatives appear, in their proactiveness, to be a welcome addition to a range of measures addressing adverse human rights impacts by business. This article questions the claim that these projects significantly advance women’s rights. Instead, they can be understood as a manifestation of what Catherine Rottenberg terms ‘neoliberal feminism’ with women at risk of being transformed into ‘gender capital’ for business gain. This article rejects the claim that empowerment can only be delivered by encouraging women into market-based work. Instead, it is argued that the corporate responsibility to respect the human rights of women can better be supported by reorienting business away from its preoccupation with delivering value for shareholders, towards an approach that values women’s unpaid socially reproductive labour.

Disinformation, hate speech and political polarization are evident problems of the growing relevance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in current societies. To address these issues, decision-makers and regulators worldwide discuss the role of digital platforms in content moderation and in curtailing harmful content produced by third parties. However, intermediary liability rules require a balance that avoids the risks arising from the circulation at scale of harmful content and the risks of censorship if excessive burdens force content providers to adopt a risk-averse posture in content moderation. This piece examines the trend of altering intermediary liability models to include ‘duty of care’ provisions, describing three models in Europe, North America and South America. We discuss how these models are being modified to include greater monitoring and takedown burdens on internet content providers. We conclude with a word of caution regarding this balance between censorship and freedom of expression.

Since 2017, the government of the People’s Republic of China has heightened repression of Uyghur and other minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Repressive tactics involve family separations, mass incarceration, forced labour and cultural indoctrination. This has been accompanied, in recent years, with an aggressive industrialization of the area which relies heavily on the forced labour of Uyghur and other minorities. The automotive industry, in particular, has expanded into the region. This piece describes China’s push of heavy industry into XUAR and recent findings by Sheffield Hallam University and NomoGaia of abuses against Uyghurs and their links to the global automotive sector. It then explains the methodology employed by NomoGaia in its co-authored report with scholars from Sheffield Hallam University for linking abuses in the XUAR to global brands, and proposes a way forward for the industry.