Regulating multinational corporations: Lessons from business and human rights

Speaker: Professor John G. Ruggie, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Chair: Professor Richard Moorhead, UCL Laws
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: UCL Centre for Ethics & Law

About this lecture

The lesson starts with a powerful, consensus-based normative framework based on consultation with all key stakeholders, which shows what businesses and states should do, and which is made operational through guiding principles that provide a blueprint for how to do it.

The resulting regulation can take many forms, and can come from multiple sources and directions, such as national policy, legislation, and regulation, multi-stakeholder standard setting initiatives, industry trade association guidance and rules, judicial and non judicial dispute resolution, company processes and practices, and the advocacy of civil society, as well as targeting international legal instruments to name a few.

About the speaker

John G. Ruggie is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government and an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He trained as a political scientist, and has made substantial contributions to the study of international relations, globalization and the emergence of new rule-makers.

From 1997-2001, he served as United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning, a post created for him by Kofi Annan and has led work establishing the UN Global Compact, now the world’s largest corporate citizenship initiative. In 2005, Professor Ruggie was appointed as the UN Secretary-Generals Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, tasked with proposing measures to strengthen the human rights performance of the business sector around the world.

In June 2011 the UN Human Rights Council, in an >Core elements of these Principles have also been adopted by the OECD, the International Standards Organization, the International Finance Corporation and the European Union. They constitute the most comprehensive and authoritative global standard in the area of business and human rights.

Ruggie UCL Lecture Final Read-Only

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Professor John Ruggie explains in his annual lecture  (Regulating multinational corporations: Lessons from business and human rights) his current thinking on the significance of the UN Principles on Business and Human Rights. How far can principled pragmatism devoted to progress succeed where proceeding through international treaties have failed? Is it possible to insinuate those Principles into enterprise wide systems, and speak to different regulatory systems: the public, the corporate and the social systems within which business operates. We heard how polycentric regulation and a deft, complex and sometimes controversial approach to ‘rights’, the  UN Principles, and the work that follows on from them, seeks to orchestrate meaningful and significant behaviour change on a global scale.