Business of Human Rights

In a time when multinational corporations have become truly globalised, demands for global standards on their behaviour are increasingly difficult to dismiss. Work conditions in sweatshops, widespread destruction of the environment, and pharmaceutical trials in third world countries are only the tip of the iceberg.

This timely collection of essays addresses the interface between the calls for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the demands for an extension of international human rights standards. Scholars from a vast variety of backgrounds provide expert yet accessible accounts of questions of law, politics, economics and international relations and how they relate to one another, while also encouraging non-legal perspectives on how businesses operate within and around human rights.

The result is an essential incursion for a wide range of scholars, practitioners and students in law, development, business studies and international studies, in this emerging area of human rights.

Aurora Voiculescu is Senior Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies and Human Rights in the Department of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Law, the University of Westminster (London). She is the co-editor (with D. McBarnet and T. Campbell) of The New Corporate Accountability: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law (2007).

Helen Yanacopulos is senior lecturer in International Politics and Development at The Open University. She is the co-editor of Civil War, Civil Peace (2005). She has acted as a consultant to various international agencies in matters of civil society, labour and human rights.