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2 results

  • 4 - Corporate Human Rights Violations: Direct and Indirect

  • from Part II - Setting the Scene
  • Florian Wettstein, Universität St Gallen, Switzerland
  • Book:
    Business and Human Rights
    Published online:
    05 March 2022
    Print publication:
    24 March 2022, pp 65-76

  • Summary

    Corporations can be implicated in human rights violations in direct and indirect ways: Direct violations are caused by corporations through their own activities; indirect violations are caused by third parties and corporations contribute indirectly. This chapter looks in detail at this important distinction between direct and indirect human rights violations. It presents a common typology of different kinds of complicity, ranging from direct to indirect, beneficial and silent complicity. It then contrasts some legal and non-legal implications deriving from these. Before doing so, some critical reflection on terminology is provided, particularly as it pertains to the notions of human rights impacts and human rights violations.

  • Silence as Complicity: Elements of a Corporate Duty to Speak Out Against the Violation of Human Rights

  • Florian Wettstein
  • Journal:
    Business Ethics Quarterly / Volume 22 / Issue 1 / January 2012
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 January 2015, pp. 37-61
    Print publication:
    January 2012

  • Increasingly, global businesses are confronted with the question of complicity in human rights violations committed by abusive host governments. This contribution specifically looks at silent complicity and the way it challenges conventional interpretations of corporate responsibility. Silent complicity implies that corporations have moral obligations that reach beyond the negative realm of doing no harm. Essentially, it implies that corporations have a moral responsibility to help protect human rights by putting pressure on perpetrating host governments involved in human rights abuses. This is a controversial claim, which this contribution proposes to analyze with a view to understanding and determining the underlying conditions that need to be met in order for moral agents to be said to have such responsibilities in the category of the duty to protect human rights.