Rethinking corporate human rights responsibility: a functional model

In the contemporary economic order, businesses often control key resources and services necessary for realizing human rights. However, the scope of their responsibilities, as outlined by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), remains unclear, leading to inconsistent or minimalist interpretations. Building on the academic debate on States’ ‘human rights jurisdiction’ as a condition for the emergence of human rights responsibility, we propose a ‘functional model of corporate responsibility’ that focuses on companies’ functions, and the resulting power relationships, as the basis for assigning responsibility for human rights, including the responsibility to fulfil under certain circumstances. The model offers a unifying theory of interpretation of the corporate ‘responsibility to respect’ under the UNGPs grounded in the normativity of international human rights law. In doing so, it overcomes the inconsistent normative foundations of the UNGPs, which ground the corporate responsibility to respect in the non-legal concept of ‘societal expectations’. The article presents the core features of the proposed functional model and, through practical examples, it shows how the model clarifies the respective negative and positive responsibilities of States and corporations. It elaborates on the potential added value of the model and discusses its limitations.