Business & Human Rights Resource Centre Website Relaunched

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, a research website set up by human rights NGOs and various academic organizations, has just launched its re-designed website.

The Resource Centre is an independent non-profit that encourages companies to respect human rights by bringing reports about their conduct - positive & negative - to a global audience.

Among the many features available on the site:

• The Centre keeps track of the human rights record of over 3,600 corporations worldwide. For example, my corner grocery store only sells Chiquita bananas. Now, I love bananas, they are my favourite fruit but I was wondering whether Chiquita products were OK. So, I checked their human rights record: oh oh! - sorry, I don't think I want Colombian death squads mixed in with my shopping basket
• "News" and "Feature of the week" on the homepage
• A very deep archive of news & reports from a wide range of sources on over 160 sectors; 180 countries; 160 issues
• Materials published come from NGOs, companies & business organisations, the UN, ILO & other intergovernmental organisations, governments & courts, policy experts & academics, social investment analysts

Earlier Library Boy posts about the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre include:

• Weekly Updates Available from Business and Human Rights Database (March 22, 2005): "Corporate profiles include news stories, items about investigations, lawsuits and enforcement actions, as well as official responses (...) The Centre has also just introduced a new feature, Weekly Updates, which are e-mail alerts with an interesting twist: companies are invited to respond to reports that criticise them, and the responses are included. This is to help keep the updates balanced and encourage companies to publicly address important labour and human rights concerns being raised by civil society organizations such as labour unions, development associations, Third World NGOs, and human rights organizations."
• Yahoo! and Human Rights Repression in China (September 22, 2005): "The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, a research website set up by Amnesty International and various academic and business organizations, has an update on the case that raises many legal issues. The update includes an article from the San Francisco Chronicle that discusses how foreign Internet firms can resist Chinese government pressures, an official response from Yahoo! on the incident, as well as critical commentaries by 3 human rights experts..."
• Amnesty International UK and USA's Human Rights, Trade and Investment Matters (June 28, 2006): "I picked up a reference to this document at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. The UK and USA branches of the international human rights NGO Amnesty International released a collection of articles last month that explore the connections between trade, investment and human rights, and consider the potential for integrating human rights into trade and investment agreements."