The Role of Ethics in Corporate Human Rights Impact Assessments

This chapter is organized under two main sections. The first discusses how the content requirements of HRIAs are conflated with the ethical requirements of the assessment itself. This, narrow and inadequate species of HRIA ethics is quite different from the extensive body of legal ethics. The second section provides a case study of a World Bank-related impact assessment, which gives rise to legal and non-legal ethical issues and which is meant to demonstrate that the absence of concrete human rights-centred ethical guidelines in HRIAs can, even with the best of intentions, lead to outcomes that effectively violate fundamental rights.