Abstract
In the past two decades there has been a movement to regulate the human rights impacts of corporate activity through disclosure-based rules. These rules require companies to gather and disclose to regulators information about their own supply chains and the materials used to make their products. Scholars and advocates argued that transparency was a powerful tool to use against a variety of corrupt behaviours by corporations and public officials. The most prominent of these regulations in the United States, the conflict minerals and disclosure of payments provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, required thousands of companies to investigate their supply chains, report what they found, and disclose payments to foreign officials in pursuit of energy deals. Since it came into office, the Trump Administration has quickly begun to eliminate these rules and abandon the U.S. leadership role in the human rights movement. In this chapter, I argue that disclosure-based regulations can be powerful tools under the appropriate conditions and demonstrate how U.S. law worked in the short time it was in effect. I also show, through the analysis of recent cases, that in the absence of U.S. rules less transparency can create the conditions for more corruption and less respect for human rights.
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Notes
- 1.
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), Pub. L. No. 111-203, § 1502, 124 Stat. 1376, 2213-18.
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Ochoa and Keenan (2011), pp. 131–132.
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Whitney (2015).
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Ochoa and Keenan (2011), pp. 132–133 (201).
- 17.
To be sure, the payment of bribes is prohibited under U.S. law. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits U.S. companies from paying bribes to foreign governments or their agents. But the FCPA carves out exceptions for payments for “facilitating or expediting” government actions. Section 1504 would cover both payments that would violate the FCPA and payments that would fall within one of the exceptions.
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See the contribution by Nowrot in this volume.
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It is, of course, possible that governments will utilize what is often called the Angola Model of financing, in which the government receives infrastructure or other in-kind assistance from the company.
- 24.
For an analysis of such regulations, Ochoa and Keenan (2011), pp. 136–137.
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It is important to note that the SEC itself acknowledged that its estimate was “intentionally overly inclusive.”, United States Government Accountability Office, SEC Conflict Minerals Rule: Initial Disclosures Most Companies Were Unable to Determine the Source of Their Conflict Minerals 13, GAO-15-561, August 2015, https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/672051.pdf (last accessed 1 October 2018).
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Schwartz (2016).
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See the chapter by Feldt in this volume.
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Haufler (2010), p. 59.
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Keenan, P.J. (2019). United States Law and Conflict Minerals. In: Feichtner, I., Krajewski, M., Roesch, R. (eds) Human Rights in the Extractive Industries. Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11382-7_3
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