Institute for Human Rights: Official Launch Event

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The UCL Institute for Human Rights (IHR), co-sponsored by the Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction, was officially launched on 15 October 2009 with a high-profile event on 'Corporate Social Responsibility & Human Rights: Have Ten Years of Voluntarism Worked?".

While international corporations are taken to court for complicity in human-rights abuses and the trade in child labour and sweatshops is still a scourge throughout the world, this event asked whether the international approach to CSR of the last ten years has worked. The approach of the last decade has focused primarily on voluntary measures taken by companies and enterprises, and finds expression in codes of conduct and non-binding agreements like the UN Global Compact. The CSR movement originally proposed some measures which should be legally binding on corporations, together with voluntary measures, but this was rejected for a voluntarist approach. Ten years on the event could ask: Has this worked?

Speakers included Susan George, Leif Wenar (philosopher), Robert McCorquodale (Director of the British Institute of International & Comparative Law), Colm O'Cinneide (Legal Adviser (Equalities) to the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights) and Richard Howitt MEP.

For further information, please see the Institute for Human Rights website.

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