Where do we go from here? Business & Human Rights Post-#BrexiTrump

My plan is to move to posting on Mondays, but as I posted so much over the weekend, I'm going to cheat this week and use my post for the Essex Human Rights Centre Blog, hosted by my alma mater the University of Essex. When I post elsewhere, I'll cross-post a snippet here with a link to the larger piece on the original blog. 

This year’s UN Forum on Business and Human Rights took place last week. Repeatedly, speakers raised the significance of #brexiTrump (the combination of the #brexit and Trump votes) while questioning its impact for the field. This post attempts to respond to questions from colleagues in the field about where we go from here and how we support students who want to pursue B&HR.

For those unfamiliar with business and human rights, it’s the subfield that focuses on how businesses negatively impact human rights and how we should best respond to those impacts. The focus is on the negative impacts because while we recognize that businesses – all businesses – can have positive impacts on human rights, businesses are not allowed to “offset” their negative human rights impacts by providing positive ones elsewhere. Instead, businesses are expected, at a minimum, to respect the range of human rights for all people, to mitigate any threats they can identify in advance, and to remedy any impacts that are unavoidable. Businesses are to take responsibility for their impacts across the range of human rights (the leading document calls for them to consider the rights present in the UDHR, ICCPR, ICESCR, and the ILO’s fundamental Conventions) and for all individuals they impact.

So in light of #brexiTrump, where should the field go? I have three “takeaways” for the field of B&HR.

1. We share concerns with Trump supporters. Let’s influence the discussion.

See the rest of the longer post here.