Knowledge and Power in Human Rights Due Diligence Regulations

New human rights due diligence laws are intended to elevate discussions on corporate responsibility for respecting human rights to a new level of legal obligations. This article looks beyond the jurisprudential discussion and emphasises the political side of this trend. In particular, it focuses on its power effects. Starting from a reconstruction of the controversial discussions on corporate accountability, which are informed by (new) materialist theories of law, I first highlight the dialectic of increasing transnational accountability standards for companies in the field of human rights: While obligations for companies to comply with standards are growing, there is also a reification of the corporate form as a vehicle for the implementation of human rights. This imposes narrow limits on human rights as a potentially emancipatory tool and also strengthens the political role of corporations as regulators. I take this dialectical assumption as a starting point for a consideration of the knowledge practices contained in new due diligence laws, which become a core component of transnational human rights regulation. Corporate data through audits, certifications, reporting and self-disclosure become the knowledge base for legality and legitimisation of corporate action, as I show through an analysis of the content of selected national due diligence laws. At the same time, human rights become calculable and plannable and can be used in corporate strategy - they literally become account-able. The company itself, its underlying rationality construction of the market and transnational processes of value appropriation also become sources of human rights assessment and justification, a process that has been linked to a neo-liberal epistemology and a moralisation of both markets and the corporate form. Corporate accountability is thus more than a consolidation of standards through legal anchoring, but rather a policy of strengthening the corporate form as a regulatory instrument that is extended to the field of human rights. The ‘Decade of Implementation’ recently proclaimed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights appears against this background in an ambivalent political light, since norm implementation through due diligence is itself understood as a political process, i.e. as a process in which power relations, the rationale of profits and competition, and associated claims to justification come into play. As a result, my analysis points to the high importance of information, its formats and the related struggles for validation and interpretation in the field of due diligence law, but also beyond law in corporate practice and civil society human rights activism. My conclusion is that it is not so much transparency as a norm and goal, but knowledge production as a process and means that should be at the centre of political debates about the design of progressive transnational regulatory approaches. By drawing boundaries and exclusions, these processes of knowledge production fabricate both corporate obligations, but at the same time also corporate legitimacy as well as limits and potentials for human rights activism and public regulation of transnational corporations.