Projects
Business and Human Rights
The Center works to raise global awareness about the relationship between business activities and human rights and to promote accountability for business-related abuses.
Business activity has a profound influence on the lives and livelihoods of people around the world. Yet responses to the negative effects of business activity on human rights often emerge in response to specific controversies, cover a limited set of rights, or apply selectively to individual companies or industries or particular regional contexts, such as conflict areas.
The Center works to address this problem by laying bare the enormous impact that businesses have on a wide spectrum of human rights in a variety of industries across the world, analyzing gaps in the international protection regime, and advocating the development of stronger legal standards for business and human rights. To date, the Center has partnered with Human Rights Watch to produce a report illustrating how everyday business decisions have significant implications for the human rights of workers, local communities, suppliers, and consumers.
SPECIAL FEATURE LAUNCH
A new “In Focus” feature launched by the Business and Human Rights Documentation (B-HRD) Project details the tactics pursued by “Big Pharma” to protect patents for key drugs in India and Brazil, increasing costs of life-saving drugs and frustrating access to essential medicines. The feature showcases the strategies of human rights defenders to challenge abusive business practices and counterbalance patent safeguards with strong human rights protections
DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
The Business and Human Rights Documentation Project
A boy searches through trash in a harsh environment for plastic and metal to sell on the Filipino open market. © 2008 Tham Joo Kit /Mio Cade Photography
The Center has partnered with the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) in creating the Business and Human Rights Documentation Project (B-HRD), a cutting edge web-based advocacy and educational resource to provide a much-needed legal and advocacy tool to better understand the relationship between business activities and human rights, and to assist in the development of progressive business norms. For more information, please see the project page and visit B-HRD at www.B-HRD.org
REPORT
CHRGJ releases report "Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights, and the Agrarian Crisis in India" (2011)
It is estimated that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. A great number of those affected are cash crop farmers, and cotton farmers in particular. In 2009 alone, the most recent year for which official figures are available, 17,638 farmers committed suicide—that’s one farmer every 30 minutes. While striking on their own, these figures considerably underestimate the actual number of farmer suicides taking place. Women, for example, are often excluded from farmer suicide statistics because most do not have title to land—a common prerequisite for being recognized as a farmer in official statistics and programs.
This Report focuses on the human rights of Indian farmers and of the estimated 1.5 million surviving family members who have been affected by the farmer suicide crisis to date. Millions more continue to face the very problems that have driven so many to take their lives. The Report seeks to amplify the many voices calling on the Indian government to act now to put an end to this unmitigated disaster. Farmers in the western state of Maharashtra, for example, now address their suicide notes to the President and Prime Minister, in the hopes that their deaths may force the Indian government to remedy the conditions that have led so many farmers to take their own lives. Rachmandra Raut, who committed suicide in 2010, even went to the trouble of purchasing expensive official stamp paper and—in laying out the reasons for his despair to this official audience—cited two years of successive crop failure and harassment by bank employees attempting to recover his loans.
REPORT
CHRGJ releases report: Foreign Land Deals and Human Rights: Case Studies on Agricultural and Biofuel Investment (2010)
Companies and states investing in large-scale land deals must be held to standards of transparency and accountability to ensure that these deals do not threaten human rights and food security, said the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at NYU School of Law in a report released at a public launch today.
The 118-page Report, Foreign Land Deals and Human Rights: Case Studies on Agricultural and Biofuel Investment, examines both the immediate and anticipated impacts of large-scale land deals on the fulfillment of human rights in host communities. Based on a year-long study, the Report includes four case studies that evaluate, in unprecedented detail, investments in biofuels, food crops, timber, and carbon credits in Tanzania, Sudan, Mali, and Pakistan—countries that suffer from acute poverty, food insecurity, and in some cases, are still in fragile, post-crisis transitions. According to the Report, these factors heighten the risk of serious human rights consequences for the host communities of these investments, which makes the call for transparency and regulation all the more urgent.
DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
CALL for PHOTOS: The Business and Human Rights Documentation (B-HRD.org) Project
Do you have photos that show the effects businesses have on human rights? Consider donating them to the Business and Human Rights Documentation (B-HRD) Project.
BHRD.org is a new joint initiative of ESCR-Net and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at NYU School of Law. B-HRD is an interactive, multi-lingual information portal that will provide a much-needed legal and advocacy tool to better understand the relationship between business activities and human rights, and to assist in the development of progressive socially responsible business norms. To ensure it is visually compelling, we are now soliciting donations of photographs for use on the website.
Contact Information: bhrdatabaseATgmail.com
REPORT
CHRGJ releases "Transnational Corporations and the Right to Food" in honor of World Food day (2009)
In recognition of World Food day, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law is proud to make public the report Transnational Corporations and the Right to Food. This paper was authored by the group Law Students for Human Rights at NYU School of Law, under the guidance and direction of the CHRGJ and Faculty Director Smita Narula, who in fall 2008 accepted an appointment to be part of the Advisory Board to the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter.
This paper was prepared in Spring 2009 at the Special Rapporteur's request with the aim of informing a multi-stakeholder consultation he convened in June 2009 in Berlin, Germany on the role of the agribusiness sector in the realization of the right to food. The student authors--Aaron Bloom, Colleen Duffy, Monica Iyer, Aaron Jacobs-Smith, and Laura Moy--worked closely with CHRGJ's 2008-09 Center Fellow Lama Fakih, who attended the June consultation alongside the Special Rapporteur.
The Center continues to work closely with Mr. de Schutter in support of his mandate and has made it a project for its 2009-10 International Human Rights Clinic. CHRGJ is also actively involved in other economic, social, and cultural rights issues, including its current work on the right to food in Haiti, which follows up on its 2008 report, Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti.
REPORT
Business: Rights at Risk in the Global Economy
Companies Harm Human Rights Worldwide
(New York, February 19, 2008) – People in countries across the world are regularly harmed when businesses fail to respect basic human rights, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University School of Law.
The clear evidence of widespread abuse and government inaction detailed in the report shows that global standards are needed to ensure that corporate conduct respects internationally recognized human rights.
The 53-page report, On the Margins of Profit: Rights at Risk in the Global Economy, was jointly prepared by Human Rights Watch and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. It illustrates how everyday business decisions have significant implications for the human rights of workers, local communities, suppliers, and consumers.
