Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

At an international seminar on business and human rights in London in December 2005, Luis Moreno Ocampo, who had assumed responsibility as the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, spoke eloquently about ways to bring peace to northern Uganda. He focused on young children being recruited into conflict in northern Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army, which is accused of having abducted some 20,000 children over 19 years. The audience was a sympathetic one: it comprised senior executives of some of the largest multinational companies in the world, and included senior representatives of those companies that had come together under the Business Leaders’ Initiative on Human Rights,1 to ‘road-test’ the Norms and Responsibilities for Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights.2 Ocampo exhorted the corporate leaders to create jobs for these youths so that they did not return to a life of crime or violence. The executives found Ocampo’s presentation moving, but were their companies ever going to be in a position to recruit disarmed child soldiers?