HEC Students Shine Light on Business and Human Rights

The 2023-2024 academic year has seen a growing number of HEC programs devoted to business, human rights and transparency. From the LGBTQIA+ crisis in Uganda; to whistleblowers testifying against major banks; peace studies for students from war-torn zones; and several top-class investigations by Sustainability Master scholars… HEC students have been offered rare insights into gruesome human rights realities in the business world - and are proposing solutions to eliminate them. We focus on the student research papers in the aforementioned SASI Master.

This is not the first year HEC Paris has been querying the binding commitment between Business and Human Rights, BHR, far from it. For its 15 years of existence, the students of the Master in Sustainability And Social Innovation (SASI) have been exposed to the challenges human rights violations pose at all levels.

Indeed, how can leaders and future leaders find a fairer balance between human rights and business? This has been at the heart of the course Charles Autheman (H09) has been teaching for the past three years to young scholars at HEC’s pre-experience level. For the first time in the 2023-2024 academic year, he’s addressed more experienced streams that are attracted to the SASI Master: “One of the assignments I always give to students is to draft an essay on a critical business and human rights issue, exploring possible recommendations or discussing existing solutions,” says the academic who, as an independent consultant, advises the I.L.O. and other U.N. agencies on such questions. “The range of issues they’ve tackled this year has been impressive. Many challenges demand original research, given that several subjects in BHR remain under-explored, especially from a business or management perspective.” Indeed. There exists only one dedicated journal, Business and Human Rights, discussing these issues. And, in university circles, there remains an acute lack of research on this sensitive field.

 Charles Authemann addressing his Business & Human Rights class.

Students Document Abuses

Over the course of 18 class hours, Autheman guided 43 SASI students through the large number of tensions businesses face in the legal, strategic, reputational and economic fields, to name but a few. They proceeded to research and write up essays on BHR topics of their choosing, either individually or in groups of up to three. “They were to explore a critical BHR issue, propose possible remedies or discuss existing solutions,” says Autheman. “This year, students have gone quite far in their research. Some explored well-documented issues such as conflict minerals, prison labor or labor exploitation of migrant workers. Others deep dived into less conventional issues such as working conditions of children in competitive gymnastics or human rights issues in slaughterhouses.”

The result has been remarkable. Much of the research is original and casts an alert eye on oft-neglected topics: the child and refugee labor used and abused in Turkish hazelnut production farms which feed into Nutella products (Loéva Nahon); biopiracy in the Amazon (Alexander Hörr and Alice Félix da Silva); exploitation of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon (Nicolas Lahoud); the responsibility of Western companies in aiding and abetting human rights abuses in the occupied West Bank of Palestine (Emma Tatham); and many more.

Some concerns are geographically far, like the challenges of fish meal on livelihoods on the West African coasts. Others are uncomfortably close to home: Sacha Krajcik shows how the fine particles in Paris’ underground system is an abuse of the individuals’ right to clean air, one of UNGA’s core 2021 resolutions. A trio of Irish students, meanwhile, analyze the reparation mechanisms for survivors of the Magdalene Laundries. And Afghan refugee Behista Nazir shares her firsthand encounters with Afghan construction workers abused in Iran to bring to light a tragedy that is too rarely addressed.

Taking BHR Cases to Authorities

Such concerns have echoed down the three years of this dedicated course at HEC. When Charles Autheman began the exchanges in 2022, he encouraged the pre-experience students to seek solutions to reconcile business imperatives whilst respecting fundamental rights. At the time, he predicted that this induction into BHR could leave a lasting mark on the students: “ Most probably, the new perspectives they have acquired during this course will be of use when taking decisions on human and labor rights-related issues,” he wrote. “And hopefully, other students will be given the opportunity to walk in their footsteps and advance the continuous effort to uphold fundamental human rights for all.”

Some of the students have already shared their research in exchanges with political instances. On March 6, for example Loéva Nahon described her work on abuses of children and refugees in hazelnut farms in France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. “It’s distressing to note that much of the harvest ends up in popular products like Nutella … Nestle’s candy bars and Godiva’s chocolates,” she pointed out. “This underscores the urgency for systemic changes to address the deep-rooted issues in Turkey’s hazelnut production.” At the ceremony, Nahon became one of 12 HEC students to be decorated as Ambassadors for Business & Peace.

This engagement took another major step a month later when 90 SASI students went on a “learning expedition” to Geneva’s UN and ILO headquarters. The plunge into labor migration, responsible business conduct and fundamental principles and rights at work allowed them to gauge the BHR issues that continue to plague the business world and hear from technical specialists working daily to address them. “Navigating the complexities of a just transition presents multifaceted challenges,” noted student Leonie Hoffmann, “and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Nevertheless,” she concluded, “the approaches and insights presented by the ILO during our visit were truly inspiring.”

All in all, around 250 HEC students have been exposed to BHR, according to Charles Autheman. They range from scholars in the  LEAD Campus program, to the Business & Peace Academy. On May 30, he will be addressing around 100 more students in the X-HEC Entrepreneurs program as well as an online exchange with executives involved in the Sustainable Transition Management course organized by HEC ExEd. 

Such engagement has developed exponentially in business schools this past decade. Let us end with a quote from Australia's Monash University: "Even if they were never intended to cause harm, some business decisions can lead to human rights abuses. That’s why educating future leaders to think about the consequences of their actions is critical. Understanding basic business human rights is important in a global economy."

For more information on the HEC Business and human rights essays from different HEC BHR classes (comprising of the 2021-2024 pre-experience classes and the SASI class 2023-2024), we invite you to explore this fascinating interactive map, reproduced at the start of this article. To receive a copy of any of the essays featured, please send a request to charles.autheman@external.hec.fr

 
SASI students tour the ILO on April 16 and meet Maria Gallotti and Kenza Dimechkie from the Labour Migration branch. Three of them presented their student research on the human rights abuses of Thai workers in Israeli agriculture and the “dark side” of avocado production in the Mexican state of Michoacan.