Crafting human rights compliance. OECD national contact points and disappointment

What kind of accountability emerges when state actors offer their ‘good offices’ to mediate in disputes over conduct elsewhere? This paper investigates National Contact Points (NCPs): mediative bodies that were designed to promote and resolve issues raised around the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. OECD member states set up NCPs as forums whereby complainants – often enterprising NGOs – raise ‘Specific Instances’ regarding corporate actors’ conduct in other states. The NCP receives the complaint, asks for a response and offers to facilitate both parties reaching agreement on a resolution.

We investigate the UK and other National Contact Points, analysing all Specific Instances filed NCP since 2001 classified by date, complainant, firm and campaign and consider impacts, failings and outcomes. In doing so we argue that NCPs reflect and contribute to transfiguring of human rights. The NCP’s work often reconfigures human rights challenges to past corporate conduct into accounts of promised procedural regularity in future. Much of the potential for human rights to challenge and constrain is punctured, replaced by a focus on reporting; process; communication and transparency.

In this sense the NCPs act as part of a governance and accountability framing of problems that actively works against responsibility and blame for past conduct. Being accountable often rests on the promise to become accountable, rather than focusing on acknowledging, redressing and remedying harms. The work of ethics in this context promotes process as an alternative to blame.