Getting to Accountability: Business, Apartheid and Human Rights (original) (raw)

1999, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights

The article examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRCY as a process for holding businesses accountable for human rights violations. The TRC convened special hearings in Johannesburg in November 1997 on the role of business under apartheid. Based on the evidence, white businesses should have appliedfor amnesty as perpetrators ofhuman rights violations. But this did not happen. The article discusses the achievements and constraints of the business hearings, and examines some of the lessons which can be gleaned from the South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the continuing universal struggle to hold corporations responsible for human rights violations during authoritarian regimes. I Between Trials and Codes of Conduct The concept of holding businesses accountable for human rights violations has become an lUcreasingly accepted notion since World War II. The spectrum of accountability mechanisms has ranged from trials and tribunals, based on both national and international human rights law to, in recent decades, a proliferation of codes of conduct. At one extreme are judicial proceedings, including criminal prosecutions, such as the Nuremberg Tribunal, where convicted defendants are incarcerated, and civil actions for monetary compensation.2 At the other end are the codes of conduct, characterised by voluntary Beth S. Lyons is a public defender in New York City and an Alternate Delegate to the United Nations in New York for the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), a non-governmental organisation, founded in 1946. She interned at the Truth and Reconciliation Cornmission 's Capetown office in late 1996 and worked on the issues of destruction of State documents, and the relationship between amnesty and criminal prosecution. She has also observed some of the Commission's hearings including the business hearings in November 1997 (Johannesburg). She is grateful to the editors of the NQHR, Leonard Cohen, Betsy Hutchings, Lucy Marx, Velile Notshulwana and Dr. Fazel Randera for their comments. The views expressed are solely the author's.