Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights and Business Schools' Responsibility to Teach It: Incorporating Human Rights into the Sustainability Agenda

The preamble to the universal declaration of human rights calls on every organ of society to teach and educate for the promotion of the rights it contains. However, few if any business schools contain any systematic and critical discussion of human rights in their accounting and business curricula. This oversight is becoming increasingly apparent as interest and concern grows over the increasing size and power of MNC’s in relation to the state, the traditional duty bearer in relation to human rights. The growing number of cases where large multinational corporations have been complicit in human rights violations, along with an increasing role for corporations in the provision of state services, has resulted in a number of new initiatives by the United Nations to bring the Universal Declaration to bear on business activity, along with a raft of international standards and protocols. This essay begins to explore how the discourse and apparatus of international human rights is shifting to focus on
the responsibilities of corporations in relation to the protection and promotion of human rights, in conjunction with the now apparent increase in focus on sustainability, and in doing so presents the case for incorporating human rights into business and accounting education at both the tertiary and professional level. The paper concludes by presenting the challenge that the emerging discourse on business and human rights presents to the dominate ideology
taught in business schools and outlines a number of principles that should characterize any attempt to bring human rights into the accounting and business curricula. It is contended that a key objective should involve exploring the articulation between human rights and sustainability.