Addressing Corporate Human Rights Impacts: the Responsible Stakeholder Model at the Intersection of Corporate Sustainability and Business and Human Rights

Background, and rationaleIn the context of the ongoing global pandemic, the research visit will explore few anticompetitive practices of price control, drug availability and other monopoly privileges exercised by states and corporate holders of patents over vaccines and medicines for the prevention and treatment of Covid-19. While such monopoly privileges are underpinned by the shareholder primacy business model and will enhance higher returns on investment for shareholders, such predatory practices are how-ever at the expense of the rights to healthcare of corporate stakeholders in the Global South such as end users and consumers of these vaccines who will have to contend with either paying highly exorbitant prices for the patented vaccines or risk suffering the potentially severe or even fatal health impacts of Covid-19 due to non-availability or unaffordability. Accordingly, the research proposes Responsible Stakeholder Model (RSM) as a business model that will remain relevant in the wake of the on-going concerns especially for the Global South about equitable access, affordability, and sup-ply in sufficient quantities of any patented Covid-19 curative medicines or vaccines around the world. Against this backdrop, the proposed research uses a perspective at the intersection between BHR and corporate law, the research draws on, explores and further expands the frontiers of the RSM as already developed and compared with other business models in the corporate responsibility domain elsewhere. The theoretical assumptions and regulatory consequences of the RSM will be expanded and applied within the Business and Human Rights (BHR) discourse towards ensuring corporate-related human rights abuses are remedied if not prevented. To be precise, the RSM will be further interrogated within the contexts of the UNGPs together with more recent efforts in the BHR domain such as the EU mandatory corporate sustainability due diligence duty to address negative human rights and environmental impacts. Overall objectivesThis research visit has two overarching aims: First, it aims to explore the intersection between Com-panies Law and BHR towards creating a workable business model in newly codified directorial du-ties to adequately respect and fulfil corporate constituents' human rights. The model will seek to ensure corporations remain commercially competitive for investors, but also providing effective safeguards to stakeholders from the impacts of asocial exercise of corporate powers.Second, the research visit aims at establishing continued collaboration between scholars at the Insti-tute and the visiting researcher and his home institution. The proposed interdisciplinary research fits well and contributes to the collaborative aim of this research stay by linking the expertise and research focus - i.e., BHR - of Prof. Florian Wettstein at the Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen, and the aim and purpose of the Competence Center for African Research (CCAR) with the visiting researcher's comparative Companies Law and BHR backgrounds. Methodology The proposed research will embrace a comparative analysis/approach in its overarching research findings. Generally, comparative approach could either be 'legislative', when foreign laws are invoked in the process of drafting new national laws (legal transplantation process), or 'scientific' and 'theoretical', when the comparison of different systems or disciplines is undertaken simply to im-prove or expand knowledge. The research adopts the comparative analysis as a scientific tool to-wards expanding socio-legal knowledge within the Business and Human Rights (BHR) and the Corporate Law disciplines with a view to identifying, assessing and eliminating unnecessary but perceived differences in the disciplines and promoting the workable business model to fulfilling corporate constituents' human rights. Expected outcomesUpon completion of this research stay, the researcher expects to produce a collaborative research paper with Prof. Florian Wettstein. The focus of the research will be on the intersection of BHR and Companies law towards finding a workable business model addressing corporate-related human rights abuses and risks. The interdisciplinary research will benefit from the extensive experience and expertise of Prof. Wettstein in BHR which complements the researcher's background in comparative Companies law.ImpactThis research stay affords the opportunity, first, for mutually beneficial exchange of ideas to expand knowledge especially regarding the unnecessary compartmentalization of the BHR discourse and undue isolation of corporate law in creating an effective and sustainable remedial framework to ad-dressing business-related human rights impacts. Second, the discourse on the intersection between BHR and Companies law is still early stage among researchers on the African continent. This re-search stay provides a rare opportunity to meet with and collaborate with Professor Wettstein, a front-running expert on the discourse and expand legal knowledge on the subject in the researcher's affiliated universities, especially at the Centre for Comparative Law in Africa (CCLA), Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Third, tapping into the proposed research's empirical focus on Africa and the researcher's affiliation with universities in Africa, the research visit opens an opportunity for continued collaboration with the Competence Center for African Research (CCAR) at the Institute for Business Ethics. Fourth, the research visit will provide the researcher with the opportunity to develop and deepen necessary research and related scholarly skills towards his career development.