Jordi Vives Gabriel

Human rights declarations are instruments used to introduce universal standards of ethics. The UN’s Protect, Respect, and Remedy Framework (Ruggie, Protect, respect, and remedy: A Framework for business and human rights. UN Doc A/HRC/8/5, 2008; Guiding principles on business and human rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘‘Protect, Respect, and Remedy’’ framework. UN Doc A/HRC/17/31, 2011) intends to provide guidance for corporate behavior in regard to human rights. This article applies concepts from the field of organizational justice to the arena of business and human rights for the purpose of operationalizing the UN Framework. This approach facilitates the recognition of gaps between perceptions of justice held by stakeholders versus businesses and/or the State. Such recognition raises the potential for addressing issues that lead to divergent perceptions of justice, thus potentially improving the human rights performance of businesses. The research also shows the potential for complicity of businesses in human rights abuses and exposes a fundamental weakness in the UN Framework, which attempts to draw a sharp distinction between duties of States versus responsibilities of business. We illustrate this approach through analysis of the case of Goldcorp’s Marlin Mine in Guatemala; an extractive industry project that affects indigenous communities.

The purpose of the paper is to enrich existing models of reintegration after organizational transgressions by analyzing the types of repair efforts and their interaction with contextual and organizational factors for the purpose of legitimacy restoration . Historical transgressions are a particularly interesting context for examining repair efforts, because they have been gaining traction in the management literature in recent years, but remain unexplored in existing models of organizational reintegration. To this end, we use the case of U.S. universities and their involvement in ante-bellum slavery and slave trade. Drawing on this case, we present a five-step process model of organizational repair efforts to legitimacy restoration for historical transgressions. We highlight that, even though most universities engaged in repair efforts, those that offered a holistic approach to their past were more likely to avoid re-problematization of their slavery past and thereby re-establish their legitimacy.

Much of the research on corporate human rights responsibility has been dealing with the clarification both of the foundations and justification of such responsibility as well as of the parameters of corporate human rights violations and the prevention thereof. This contribution, on the other hand, deals with the aftermath of corporate human rights violations, that is, with the still neglected topic of corporate human rights remedy. More specifically, the paper addresses non-material, that is, symbolic or moral dimensions of remedy-provision and the role that corporations can and ought to play in providing it. It presents four different limitations of the current remedy discussion, which are at the heart of that neglect. Based on this, it develops a typology of moral reparation and introduces symbolic remedies as a means for such reparatory efforts.