NGOs, guardians of CSR

Faced with increasingly powerful cross border actors, NGOs are multiplying the number of detailed and comprehensive reports including recommendations as well as the number of their ‘name and shame’ campaigns.  With both press releases and appeals these associations are piling on the pressure to force businesses into justifying their policies relating to fundamental human rights as well as into changing them. However NGOs are more and more critical of the limits to their current voluntary based CSR policies and are mobilizing to insert an additional element of ‘rights and obligations’.
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Various action levers have now reached their limits. Following several Global Witness reports criticizing alleged practices of corruption and violence by the British petroleum company Soco International in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in July 2015 the Church of England decided to divest its holding in Soco International because the company failed to satisfy the Church both with its response to allegations of human rights abuses and with its failure to adopt better social an

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