..[T]his paper explores how respect for human rights is emerging and being operationalised in the discourse of thirty Fortune 500 companies in the mining, pharmaceutical and chemical industries at two key points in the recent evolution of the UN’s business and human rights agenda... Specifically the paper explores the scope of rights for which corporations are accountable and, more specifically, the degree of responsibility a company assumes for enacting these rights...The study finds four grammars of respect and three different scopes of rights within specific corporate accountably disclosures on their responsibility to respect rights...Corporate constructions of human rights are broad: from labour rights, through social and political rights, to the right to health and a clean environment...The corporate discourse is one of promoting, realizing and upholding rights that construct the corporation as an autonomous source of power beyond the state.