Towards a UK corporate accountability law
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Civil society groups in the UK are campaigning for a new law to establish a ‘failure to prevent’ offence for corporate human rights abuses. This would hold companies legally liable where they fail to take adequate steps to prevent human rights and environmental abuses in their operations or supply chains. It would be modelled on the 2010 Bribery Act.
This law was first proposed in 2017 by the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, which recommended that:
“the Government bring forward legislation to impose a duty on all companies to prevent human rights abuses…[which] would require all companies to put in place effective human rights due diligence processes (as recommended by the UN Guiding Principles), both for their subsidiaries and across their whole supply chain….[to] include a defence for companies where they had conducted effective human rights due diligence, and the burden of proof should fall on companies to demonstrate that this has been done.”
The civil society campaign launched in April 2019 with a statement, calling for “an effective law to require companies and investors to take action to prevent human rights abuses, worker exploitation and environmental harm”. A parliamentary briefing of November 2022 explicitly calling for a 'Business, Human Rights and Environment Act' attracted the support of 33 civil society organisations.
A February 2020 report from the British Institute for International and Comparative Law found that such a law would be legally feasible in the UK. Further research, co-commissioned by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, has explored the options for enforcing legislation via a specialist independent regulator.
The campaign in the UK reflects a global trend toward laws requiring companies to undertake human rights due diligence. Major UK companies and investors, including ASOS, Tesco and Unilever, have called for the UK government to introduce such a law. A separate statement from UK investors with a total of £4.5 trillion in assets under management and advice echoed that call.
The UK campaign is being coordinated by the Corporate Justice Coalition, with the support of a wide range of organisations.
In November 2023, Baroness Young of Hornsey introduced to the House of Lords a private members' bill, the “Commercial Organisations and Public Authorities Duty (Human Rights and Environment) Bill”, proposing an overarching UK due diligence law. The law had its first reading in November 2023.