Closing the gap? An Analysis of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the UN Sustainable Development Goals in Business Operations

Sammanfattning: There is an increasing demand for responsible business conduct. Different mechanisms have been developed to promote and ensure such responsibility within corporate operations. Two of such mechanisms are the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These two UN mechanisms have been widely implemented into corporate operations with the objective to attain respect for human rights. However, adverse impacts on human rights continuously flourish in corporate value chains and different stakeholders are continuously affected by corporate operations. This thesis investigates three corporations that have implemented the UNGPs and the SDGs into their business operations. All three corporations are Danish supermarket chains that have experienced adverse impacts on human rights in their value chains. Though the two UN mechanisms have been implemented, the supermarket chains continuously experience human rights abuse in their operations. Therefore, Roscoe Pound’s (1910) concept of law in books and law in action elucidates the gap between the aims of the UNGPs and the SDGs and their actual impacts on the operations of the three supermarket chains. To comprehend how the three corporations generate meaning of the two UN mechanisms and thus, how these mechanisms have been implemented, Susan Silbey’s and Patricia Ewicks concept of legal consciousness is applied. The findings indicate that the supermarket chains find little purpose and understanding of these mechanisms and that the main objective to implement them has been to respond to external expectations. Therefore, there is a vital gap between the aims of the UNGPs and the SDGs and their actual influence on the operations of supermarket chains. This thesis concludes that the UNGPs and the SDGs have not contributed to respect for human rights in the corporate value chains of the supermarket chains, at least not to the aspired extent.