Fostering peace is a core goal of the Olympics and other mega-sporting events. Unfortunately, these sporting events are continually connected to (and often catalyze) human rights violations and corrupt actions that push society toward instability and away from peace. This Article reviews those problems and explores how the humanitarian goals of mega-sporting events can have a positive impact on peace, human rights, and anti-corruption efforts. In response to recent scandals, sports governing bodies have recently made significant structural reforms, at least in their governing policies, but more should be done to push these organizations towards being the peace-builders for society they aspire to become. This Article sets out the necessary next steps at this crucial time. Because it is early in the trajectory of incorporating respect for human rights and anti-corruption initiatives into the governance of mega-sporting events, it is important to fully consider our expectations for what these organizations should be doing and incorporate those expectations into their newly recognized responsibilities.

The COVID‐19 pandemic showed how vulnerable workers in global supply chains are to adverse human rights impacts. Protecting such workers must be a primary policy goal in the efforts to “build back better” from the crisis, and businesses conducting human rights due diligence (HRDD) is a primary means to do so. In Europe, there is a fast‐moving trend toward legislatively mandating HRDD, and there is potential for similar movement in the United States. Whether HRDD will significantly improve human rights conditions, however, is an open question. Based on our experience with corporate compliance programs, it is clear that the management and oversight of HRDD is an essential factor in ensuring meaningful implementation, as opposed to corporations focusing on form over substance. This article identifies those key internal governance issues and provides advice on how best to ensure effective implementation. The article argues that for most corporations, the day‐to‐day management of HRDD best fits with the compliance function—not the legal function—and this new role could be part of the next step in the evolution of the compliance function. This article also discusses the role of the board of directors and how HRDD combined with recent developments in the law of fiduciary duties can push directors to engage in more rigorous oversight. In addition, it discusses the types of information that are essential for supporting the management and oversight of HRDD.

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An essential component of ethics and compliance programs is the training of organizational members. Training helps ensure that all employees understand their legal and regulatory obligations, and company policies. There are significant legal incentives for organizations to adopt training but understanding when training is effective is challenging. After discussing the legal incentives, this chapter explores how effectiveness can be measured and reviews those factors that the academic literature has identified as potentially having a positive impact on training effectiveness.

Employee perceptions of an organization’s compliance program are critical. A program that has lost legitimacy with its employees is not just ineffective, but creates more harm than good by leading to more unethical behavior. This paper first presents two different, but often working in tandem, ways that corporate actors can inadvertently diminish the legitimacy of the compliance program. The next part discusses how an illegitimate compliance program can lead to an increase in unethical and illegal behavior. The final part suggests reforms to help protect against this process of a compliance program slowly losing its legitimacy within the organization. These reforms are a board level standing committee on compliance, an independent CECO, and a mandatory evaluation of the corporation’s ethical culture, as necessary reforms.

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This chapter reviews the impact of corruption on human rights. It evaluates the international efforts to outlaw corruption and their effectiveness to date. The chapter discusses a corporate principles approach to controlling bribery in international business transactions and reviews corporate practices. It looks at Royal Dutch/Shell's efforts at combating corruption. Corruption is an under-appreciated impediment to the realisation of human rights in developing countries. While government officials profit from bribes taken from multinational corporations and others, many citizens' rights are compromised. Like any economic transaction, corruption has both a demand side and a supply side. Public officials demand bribes, and private citizens or organisations, such as businesses, supply the bribes. Company compliance with the policies is monitored by the Audit Committee and Social Responsibility Committee, which oversees the implementation of Shell's business principles and control mechanisms. Reducing corruption is a win–win situation in that it is simultaneously pro-business and pro-human rights.

This chapter provides an introduction to corruption in international business. It includes an overview of the harms of corruption (including the connection between corruption and human rights violations), the emergence of a global anti-corruption norm, recent efforts to criminalize bribery in international business, and the role of corporations to combat corruption in their operations and in their institutional environments.

Approximately every two years the Ethics Resource Center conducts large scale survey of US employees on ethical behavior at work. Since 2000, between 41% and 55% of employees indicate that they have observed misconduct within their organizations within the last twelve month, and between 8% and 14% have felt pressure from within the organization to compromise the company’s standards. This misconduct is not just the actions of a few rogue employees scattered about various companies. In 53% of the cases of observed misconduct, the respondent indicated that the misconduct was committed by multiple people or was a company-wide problem. In addition, the respondents are not just seeing one-off instances of poor conduct. In 26% of the cases, the misconduct was identified as an “ongoing pattern,” and in an additional 41% of cases the misconduct was identified as happening over multiple incidents. Despite this widespread misconduct, over the past 13 years of the survey, between 37% and 47% of employees do not report the misconduct that they have observed. To reduce this misconduct—whether it is financial fraud, bribery, sexual harassment, antitrust violations, or any other type of wrongdoing—the government incentivizes corporations to adopt effective compliance programs. Starting in 1991, the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines provides for mitigated sentences for corporations that had effective compliance programs in place at the time of the wrongdoing. When deciding whether or not to bring criminal charges against a corporation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) considers a corporations compliance program and ethical culture. In some situations, the government requires a corporation to adopt an improved compliance program. For example, settlement agreements between a corporation and the government (such as Deferred Prosecution Agreements with the DOJ or Corporate Integrity Agreements with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) often require the corporation to make structural changes to its compliance program.

The last several years have seen a significant rise in the efforts of governments to combat the supply side of corruption. Due to these increased efforts, now is an important time to ask some of the big questions in combating corruption. In short, my big questions relate to understanding why corporations pay bribes, what corporations need to do to stop paying bribes, and how to encourage corporations to actively fight corruption (that is, to combat corruption beyond their organizational boundaries). The first section of the essay addresses the question: why do corporations pay bribes? This leads to two additional questions: why do employees pay bribes, and when are compliance and ethics programs effective in preventing the payment of bribes? The next big question focuses on issues of corporate social responsibility: what should a corporation do to combat corruption? That is, is it sufficient for a corporation to simply ensure that its employees do not pay bribes, or should the corporation do something more?

In 2016 it will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Organizational Sentencing Guidelines (OSG), which has been the single greatest influence on the structure of corporations’ compliance programs. The government and corporations continue to place faith in the ability of corporate compliance programs to reduce illegal and unethical behavior by managers and employees. Despite these efforts, the levels of observed unethical behavior by corporate employees has continued at a steady level over the past decade. In response, there has been an increased focus on trying to understand how a corporation’s culture influences its compliance program’s effectiveness. Although many (including the US Sentencing Commission through their amendments to the OSG) have recognized the importance of a corporation’s culture for controlling unethical behavior, there continues to be a wide-spread lack of understanding of the relationship between the compliance program and the corporation’s culture. This Article explains corporate culture by bringing together the latest research in behavioral and organizational ethics to present a model of an organization’s ethical infrastructure. This model integrates, rather than separates, the ideas of compliance and an ethical corporate culture. To incorporate this model into policy, this Article proposes two short amendments to the OSG that have the potential to catalyze significant change.

Increasingly, there is awareness that corruption and human rights are intimately connected. However, the debates and reform proposals on improving corporations’ social performance in these two areas are often treated as separate concerns. This article argues that companies must see combating corruption and promoting human rights as connected and complementary moral duties in the countries where they operate. MNCs know (or should know) that corruption greatly impacts their ability to respect human rights. Thus, awareness of how corruption impacts human rights throughout the MNC’s supply chain should be essential for conducting “human rights due diligence.” To accomplish this goal, MNCs should not only ensure that their employees and agents do not pay bribes, but that corruption is not standing in the way of their suppliers’ ability to meet human rights obligations. In addition, this may also include an obligation to work towards reducing the enabling environment that allows corruption to thrive in that location. This duty goes beyond legal compliance with the FCPA or other national anti-bribery laws and must be central to the discussion of corporations’ human rights obligations.