The Human Rights Institute develops and draws upon innovative human rights and interdisciplinary methodologies to investigate and assess the human rights implications of – and to promote respect of human rights in – business operations and developments in the global economy.
The Institute, together with the Human Rights Clinic, seeks to utilize, promote, and strengthen legal frameworks and strategies to advance human rights, to achieve accountability for rights violations, and to limit the subjugation of rights to the profit-motive of business enterprises around the globe. The Institute’s research seeks to recalibrate global and corporate-community power imbalances that reinforce the disparate allocation of wealth, community exploitation, threats to physical security, and the perpetuation of systems of poverty and violations of economic, social and cultural rights. In addition to publishing policy-level analysis, site-specific projects are undertaken to strengthen the power of groups negatively impacted by resource extraction, development projects, and industry, and to assist impacted groups in their pursuit of economic, social and environmental justice.
In specific projects, the Institute has collaborated with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, the Natural Resource Governance Institute (formerly Revenue Watch Institute), the International Union of Food Workers, The Carter Center, EarthRights International, and the Columbia University Earth Institute, among others