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The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights endorse a risk management perspective of human rights due diligence, which may create ambiguities with regard to the nature of risk and the objectives of risk management. By ‘human rights risk’ we understand a business enterprise’s potential adverse human rights impacts. Human rights risk can be contrasted to an enterprise’s ‘social risk’ which refers to the actual and potential leverage that people or groups of people with a negative perception of corporate activity have on the business enterprise’s value.This article puts forward the argument that due diligence in respect of human rights risk is conceptually incompatible with the management of social risk, because social risk management and human rights due diligence vary at each step of the risk management process (risk identification, risk measurement and assessment, risk reduction measures). To resolve this incompatibility, an effective integration of human rights due diligence processes into corporate risk management systems would require an elevation of human rights respect to a corporate goal that determines corporate strategy.

comparative legal ethics, international codes of ethics, law firm management, law firms, legal ethics, professional ethics, professions,

Attention is increasingly being focused on leaking, whistleblowing and associated compliance and incentives questions. The authors outline the differences between leaking and whistleblowing, notably on protection of the disclosers. They review provisions of international conventions on human rights and corruption, and compare approaches to protecting freedom of speech in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their findings highlight the complex, sometimes conflicting issues involved: public, individual, commercial and financial interests; abuse of power; security; confidentiality; the individual as law enforcer; and the employment relationship.

This article introduces compliance disclosure regimes to business ethics research. Compliance disclosure is a relatively recent regulatory technique whereby companies are obliged to disclose the extent to which they comply with codes, 'best practice standards' or other extralegal texts containing norms or prospective norms. Such 'compliance disclosure' obligations are often presented as flexible regulatory alternatives to substantive, commandand-control regulation. However, based on a report on experiences of existing compliance disclosure obligations, this article will identify major weaknesses that prevent them from becoming effective mechanisms to discipline a certain type of behaviour. It will be argued that regulatory recourse to compliance disclosure obligations is nonetheless worthwhile if we view them as mechanisms that can initiate a dialogue about norm interpretation, application and norm desirability. From this perspective, compliance disclosure obligations serve less to discipline companies by making corporate practices transparent, and more to trigger a process of norm development, in which the law, companies and their stakeholders interact. This article provides an illustration of how mandatory disclosure, if it is restricted to a unilateral communication process, may produce no effective results (or even prove counterproductive), whilst highlighting the alternative potential of disclosure as an initiator of dialogue, supported by laws, geared towards the development and refinement of norms applicable to business in a global context and the values they promote.

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Par la transposition de la directive 2006/46/CE 4 , la France a introduit en droit positif le mécanisme de communication sociétaire dit « comply or explain ». Ce faisant, le droit des sociétés français, à l’image de ses homologues européens, s’acclimate à un mode de transparence conformiste. Les sociétés cotées doivent déclarer chaque année, dans leur rapport de gouvernance, dans quelle mesure elles appliquent les principes de bonne conduite contenus dans le code AFEP-MEDEF ; elles doivent par ailleurs se justifier des règles qu’elles n’entendent pas appliquer. Il est sans doute permis de discuter les vertus communément attribuées à ce mécanisme de transparence. Tant la valeur de l’information communiquée que la valeur de la communication de l’information sont sujettes à caution. En outre, le contrôle des déclarations de gouvernance achoppe sur leur dimension essentiellement subjective. Ces déclarations semblent davantage remplir un rôle d’instigateur de confiance que de transmetteur de connaissance. Cette situation devrait engendrer des difficultés pour caractériser le préjudice des investisseurs arguant d’informations par trop « promotionnelles ». Pour autant, cela ne signifie pas que l’hyperbole en matière de gouvernance d’entreprise puisse échapper à toute sanction...