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TMU CSR Institute zoom session: Risk, Uncertainty, and the Future of Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence -- in conversation with Professor Malcom Rogge

Date
February 03, 2023
Time
12:00 PM EST - 1:30 PM EST

To view a video recording of this "in conversation" session, click here.  

The Institute for the Study of Corporate Social Responsibility at Toronto Metropolitan University*(TMU) is pleased to present an online interactive zoom session, Risk, Uncertainty, and the Future of Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence--in conversation with Professor Malcom Rogge (details below), on Friday, February 3, 2023, from 12 noon to 1:30 pm (Toronto time).

To register (no cost, everyone welcome) click HERE (external link)  and then press the "reserve a spot" button.

To patch in for the live zoom session on Friday, February 3 at 12 noon (Toronto time), click HERE (external link) . This session is exclusively a zoom event: there is no in-person component.

Information will be provided during the session re: how to submit questions.

About Risk, Uncertainty, and the Future of Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence

Malcolm will be discussing his working paper, Risk, Uncertainty, and the Future of Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence (external link) , posted in December 2022 by Harvard's Corporate Responsibility Initiative, downloadable from Harvard's "DASH" repository. The paper's abstract states as follows:

Corporate human rights due diligence is now a social fact; it is no longer merely an idea or aspiration. This paper uses economist Frank H. Knight’s famous, albeit controversial, distinction between risk and uncertainty to help elucidate foundational concepts and challenges for the theory, practice, and future regulation of HRDD. The EU, France, and Germany, among other jurisdictions, have recently adopted laws requiring large businesses to conduct human rights due diligence (HRDD) in their supply chains. The specific details of these laws, as well as their proper motivations, are contested vigorously in public deliberation. There is no overarching consensus about how legislators should define the scope of HRDD or about what rules should apply to businesses. When it comes to assessing human rights risks, the key question that both corporate decision makers and policy makers must contend with is one that Knight identified a century ago: “how far to go?” There is no definitive answer. This paper clarifies what is at stake. The uncertainties that surround HRDD should not be a cause of paralysis for businesses nor should they prevent policy makers from developing powerful and impactful regulatory tools. The paper concludes that policy makers should give priority to the normative-ethical motivation for corporate HRDD over any instrumental-economic business case that may be made in specific circumstances. Giving priority to ethics does not negate economic reasoning; rather, it recognizes that, when it comes to HRDD, economic reasoning must be led by ethical reasoning, and nested within it, not the other way around.

About Malcolm Rogge

Since January, 2021, Dr. Malcolm Rogge has been a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Business & Human Rights Law and Corporate Law & Governance at University of Exeter School of Law. From 2019 to 2021, Malcolm was a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Corporate Responsibility Initiative, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. Malcolm has a BA (Manitoba), a Masters of Environmental Studies (York) and JD (Osgoode Hall), and a Masters and Doctorate of Law (Harvard). For over twenty years, as a legal scholar and documentary filmmaker, Dr. Rogge has shed a light on the human rights impacts of company-community conflicts in the extractive sector in Canada and in Latin America. His international award-winning documentary film about a mining conflict in Ecuador called Under Rich Earth (external link) , was cited by The Northern Miner as "a classic example for companies on how not to handle community relations." In 2016, the documentary was used as evidence and cited extensively in an influential investment law decision, of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague.

Moderator

Moderating the session will be Dr. Kernaghan Webb, Director of the Toronto Metropolitan University CSR Institute and a Law and Business professor in TMU's Ted Rogers School of Management.

The talk is co-sponsored by the TMU Corporate Social Responsibility Student Association, the TMU Commerce and Government Association, and the TMU Law and Business Student Association.  

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Latest News:

TMU Professor Kernaghan Webb appointed Chair of due diligence standards group (November 15, 2022)

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