Introduction

2) A call for multinational corporate groups to adopt the same standards – or best practice – throughout their operations, wherever they may be. This call implicitly incorporates as a baseline a number of international standards – but it goes further too.

The context for both these calls, underlined by discussions at the RIIA's 1999 corporate citizenship conference, is globalisation, and its capacity, through communications innovations, to increase awareness of gaps between corporate practices at home and abroad.

Do corporate statements of general business principles or of environmental or social responsibility indicate that multinational corporations have already responded to these two calls to ‘join up' responsibility throughout their operations? Many multinational corporate groups are adopting coordinated approaches to environmental and health and safety management. Alongside voluntary initiatives such as Global Compact, or the recently revised OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the overall trend is for corporate statements of principle to apply to an entire group's operations, and to emphasise continuous performance improvement. There is little sign of a general trend towards making a concrete commitment to applying best practice throughout the group's operations, and whilst some statements contain a degree of support for human rights principles, even some of these underline difficulties translating human rights norms into commitments capable of direct application by companies.

It is not only voluntary initiatives but transnational litigation too that is now proving the testing ground for corporate responses to the two ‘campaigners' questions' – claims that responsibility in corporate groups should be ‘joined up'. The litigation also offers insights into efforts to define the respective roles of home and host country courts, and home country governments too.

It is my basic contention that we need to consider how existing legal principles – and ‘home country' courts – respond to the policy claims to ‘join up' corporate responsibility, if we are to identify a way forward for public policy – and for companies - on both the legal issues and on the campaigner's questions. And the increasing trend for transnational litigation against parent companies of multinational corporate groups provides insights into the ongoing debate on the relationship between foreign direct investment and environment and social justice.