ICAR News
04/04/2022
Over the next several months, ICAR will facilitate the development of a Corporate Accountability Agenda that will aim to detail the business and human rights movement’s legislative goals and serve as a guidepost for community advocacy. To date, there has been no cohesive corporate accountability agenda focused on the U.S. published in any one location and, to ICAR’s knowledge, no concerted effort to compile the diverse ideas within the business and human rights movement. In an effort to mobilize unified advocacy, there is a need for a comprehensive corporate accountability agenda which delineates easily-digestible legislative proposals that may educate U.S. lawmakers on our communities’ solutions to existing accountability gaps.
To ensure that the agenda is comprehensive and represents a variety of stakeholder interests, the agenda will be developed in consultation with stakeholder groups within and outside of the traditional corporate accountability movement. These include our members, partner organizations, and other experts, including those focused on technology and human rights, labor rights, racial justice, and Indigenous rights, among others. In line with ICAR’s commitment to centering the voices of impacted communities, throughout this consultation process ICAR will place a particular emphasis on integrating the views and ideas of stakeholders closest to the issues to ensure an accurate representation of the challenges on the ground.
To achieve accountability for corporate abuses, the human rights community aims to change structural incentives so that corporations cannot continue to profit from harmful practices with impunity and affected communities receive reparation and remedy for harms committed. The agenda will build on ICAR’s critical work on the 2016 U.S. National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct, and will complement ICAR’s engagement with the Biden Administration’s NAP review process. While our NAP work will address actions the executive branch can take to advance corporate accountability in the United States, the Corporate Accountability Agenda will provide recommendations for congressional action. Although the Agenda will generally not include specific legislative text, it will include specific suggestions for legislative reforms.
ICAR hopes to publish this agenda by the end of Summer 2022. After its publication, we hope that the corporate accountability community’s support will demonstrate the strength of the movement and allow us to leverage our collective interests to influence legislative change.
For questions regarding the Corporate Accountability Agenda, please contact ICAR’s Legal and Policy Fellow, Jackie Lewis.