Introduction
During the past few decades, with limited success, the United Nations Secretariat, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN human rights treaty committees, activists, non-governmental agencies, and foundations have encouraged national governments to protect and promote human rights. However, it has become clear that national governments no longer have the resources to fund the realization of economic rights, such as the right to housing, the right to education, the right to work, the right to social security, the right to a clean and safe environment, and the right to health. As a result, the UN human rights system and its supporters are now expecting transnational corporations to "respect" human rights, which, depending on one's perspective, can mean anything from obeying national laws protecting the civil and political rights of citizens to the limitless funding of a broad range of ambiguous economic, social, and cultural rights. This section covers the UN's growing "business and human rights" agenda, which works in the context of a complex adaptive matrix of human rights governance networks.
Surveillance Capitalism
As international, non-governmental, and civil society organizations pressure national governments to impose mandatory corporate reporting requirements on businesses, attention needs to be paid to the trade-offs between increased respect for human rights and the negative impact unreasonable mandates may have on economic growth, product innovation, job creation, and capital formation, especially in developing countries. The significant negative economic impact resulting from the costly initial implementation and annual reporting associated with the Conflict Minerals provision of the U.S. Dodd-Frank legislation, which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of conflict minerals that originated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a case in point. This focus area provides a forum for considering both sides of this important debate.
