Money, Millennials and Human Rights: Sustaining ‘Sustainable Investing'

Abstract

As recently as the late 1990s, "there was no recognition that companies had human rights responsibilities," according to Arvind Ganesan, head of business and human rights at Human Rights Watch. Today, that responsibility is increasingly recognized by global firms as well as the transnational regulatory ecosystems in which they operate. According to the Economist, the "watershed event" in gaining recognition for the corporate responsibility to respect human rights was the endorsement by the United Nations in June 2011 of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, calls the UNGPs "the global authoritative standard, providing a blueprint for the steps all states and businesses should take to uphold human rights." Of course, this responsibility is far from being universally acted upon even in societies where the recognition itself is relatively robust. "We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach fiasco, in which as many as 87 million Americans user profile data was compromised and then weaponized in the 2016 United States presidential election.