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Funding: This research was part of a larger PhD studentship grant, which was funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland (ICAS). The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human (UNGPs) explicitly ask corporations to rely on “external expertise” for policy guidance, human rights due diligence (HRDD), and remedy. The broad conceptualization of expertise in the UNGPs signifies an amorphous, neutral, and largely unregulated community of consultants, human rights institutions, NGOs, impact assessors, and auditors (among other actors). I argue that external experts exert significant governance authority in the business and human rights space. Through empirical analysis of experts orbiting two multinational corporations, I identify experts as knowledge providers, diplomats, critics, and legitimizers in the corporate implementation of the UNGPs. In doing so, this work adds nuanced political dimensions to expert authority in business and human rights, offering evidence of its manifestations and limitations. Finally, I advance some considerations and suggestions for future research, particularly vital in the context of incoming mandatory HRDD legislation. Publisher PDF

This article discusses the legal implications of a novel phenomenon, namely, digital reincarnations of deceased persons, sometimes known as post-mortem avatars, deepfakes, replicas, holographs, or chatbots. To elide these multiple names, we use the term 'ghostbots'. The piece is an early attempt to discuss the potential social and individual harms, roughly grouped around notions of privacy (including post-mortem privacy), property, personal data and reputation, arising from ghostbots, how they are regulated and whether they need to be adequately regulated further. For reasons of space and focus, the article does not deal with copyright implications, fraud, consumer protection, tort, product liability, and pornography laws, including the non-consensual use of intimate images (‘revenge porn’). This paper focuses on law, although we fully acknowledge and refer to the role of philosophy and ethics in this domain.We canvas two interesting legal developments with implications for ghostbots, namely, the proposed EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act and the 2021 New York law amending publicity rights to protect the rights of celebrities whose personality is used in post-mortem ‘replicas’. The latter especially evidences a remarkable shift from the norm we have chronicled in previous articles of no respect for post-mortem privacy to a growing recognition that personality rights do need protection post-mortem in a world where pop stars and actors are routinely re-created using AI. While the legislative motivation here may still be primarily to protect economic interests, we argue it also shows a concern for dignitary and privacy interests.Given the apparent concern for the appropriation of personality post-mortem, possibly in defiance or ignorance of what the deceased would have wished, we propose an early solution to regulate the rise of ghostbots, namely an enforceable ‘do not bot me’ clause in analogue or digital wills.

The female sexual and reproductive wellness industry is flourishing, valued at around US$4.5trn globally. Heavily focused on the female reproductive life cycle, products are marketed to women and girls from puberty through to the menopausal years, with medically unsubstantiated claims that can fail to deliver on promises made and leave damaging physical and psychological side-effects. In this article we ask: do the harms caused by the sexual and reproductive wellness industry fall within the boundaries of business and human rights (BHR) scholarship? We establish the landscape of the industry, identify human rights relating to sexual and reproductive healthcare and education, and use BHR literature to make the case that the industry should be placed on the BHR research agenda so that the various tools used in BHR such as the law, corporate governance, and the weight of public consciousness, can be applied to encourage appropriate regulation of this industry.

This research is part of a larger PhD studentship Grant, which is funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland (ICAS). This paper critically investigates the implementation of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights (UNGPs) into the corporate setting through the concept of ‘translation’. In the decade since the creation of the UNGPs, little academic research has focussed specifically on the corporate implementation of human rights. Drawing on qualitative case studies of two multinational corporations—an oil and gas company and a bank—this paper unpacks how human rights are translated into the corporate context. In doing so, the paper focuses on the “resonance dilemma” translators encounter, the strategies used to make human rights understandable and palatable, and the difficulties that emerge from this process. We contend that the process of making human rights understandable and manageable can change their form and content, which may act as an obstacle to human rights realisation and corporate accountability for human rights. Publisher PDF

Research for this article was partly funded by Danida, “Realising the SDGS: The role of responsible business”. National Action Plans (NAPs) on business and human rights are a growing phenomenon. Since 2011, 42 such plans have been adopted or are in-development worldwide. By comparison, only 39 general human rights action plans were published between 1993 and 2021. In parallel, NAPs have attracted growing scholarly interest. While some studies highlight their potential to advance national compliance with international norms, others criticise NAPs as cosmetic devices that states use to deflect attention from persisting abuses and needed regulation. In response to wider critiques of international human rights norms, and their failure to exact universal state compliance, experimentalist governance theory highlights the dynamic, dialogic and iterative character of human rights implementation as well as the role of stakeholders. In this article, we apply experimentalist governance theory to evaluate the role and character of business and human rights NAPs. Rather than attempting to evaluate NAPs’ ultimate consequences for rights-holders, which appears premature, we focus on NAPs processes. Specifically, we analyse NAPs processes in twenty-five states against five experimentalist governance criteria relating to (i) stakeholder participation; (ii) agreement on a broad problem definition; (iii) local contextualisation; (iv) monitoring and peer review and (v) periodic revision and learning. According to our findings, NAPs on business and human rights in most states demonstrate resemblance to the traits of experimentalist governance. In particular, our analysis points to the emergence of relatively sophisticated and demanding institutional governance mechanisms within NAPs — including the institutionalisation of complex deliberative processes. Nevertheless, our paper also identifies some significant shortcomings in NAPs, related to the lack of inclusion of vulnerable groups and the lack of explicit indicators and targets. Publisher PDF

The Corporation, Law and Capitalism might centre on international law, yet it is required reading for anyone interested in broader issues of corporate power and accountability. Over the past few de...