Human Rights

Conceptual Overview

According to the historical record, human rights were first codified in approximately 2,000 BC when Hammurabi, the king of Babylonia, issued codes for how Babylonians were to treat each other, establishing fair wages, protection of property, and requiring charges to be proven at trial. Later Moses and Mohammed set standards for how their followers were to treat one another, and the Romans developed the concept of the rights of citizens. Over the past 800 years, the Magna Carta of 1215, the English bill of rights of 1689, the U.S. Bill of Rights of 1791, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 have provided precedents for more recent declarations and conventions of human rights. Before the 20th century, those codes were designated for particular groups of persons and excluded others, often women, children, and slaves.

The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the best-regarded code of conduct, although not universally accepted by the corporate world. William Schulz, former executive director of Amnesty International, once noted that the U.N. declaration is taken variously as pragmatism, communitarianism, or postmodernism. The Global Compact, the International Labour Organization Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child have had the most impact on business organizations. These universal codes and conventions abolish child labor and forced labor, establish rights to equal pay for equal work, to a living wage, to organize and form trade unions, and to safe working conditions, as well as protection against discrimination based on race, creed, gender, religious affiliation, union affiliation, and more.

One controversy surrounding a corporation's violation of human rights centers on the definition of a corporation: whether it has the same duties and responsibilities as a person. As an example, when corporations use child labor in manufacturing or agricultural operations, on occasion they defended their practices by claiming they do not have the same moral obligations as individuals and therefore are not required to abide by the same ethical or moral standards as individuals. Their position is founded on Milton Friedman's theory of free market capitalism, which argues that corporations do not have the same responsibilities nor should be held to the same moral standards as individuals. In practice, however, the more egregious the corporate behavior, the harder it is for corporations to defend violating human rights.

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