Determining the content of corporate reporting on human rights

Business enterprises have to report their activities to stakeholders in order to provide corporate transparency. Non-financial corporate reports provide a comprehensive coverage of environmental, socio-economic, labor, health, and human rights issues. In the paper the author argues that a uniform definition of a sector-specific human rights issue in reporting frameworks, rather than self-identification by enterprises of salient human rights issues, would help to achieve standardization and thus the possibility of sanctions in the event of false or misleading reporting. The author analyzes existing international and regional non-financial reporting instruments regarding the human rights included in it. The main content issues of non-financial reporting are derived and given requirements to improve them. The author further analyzes whether the two main frameworks for human rights reporting (the GRI Standards and the UNGPs Reporting Framework) currently meet the requirements for content defined in the paper and, if not, how they can be changed.

Choice between rights issue and private placements of equity and the role of information asymmetry

PurposeThe objective of this paper is to investigate the role of information asymmetry in the equity selling mechanisms chosen by the firms from an important emerging market, India. Specifically, the authors look into the choice between the two most popular mechanisms of equity issues – rights issue and private placement of equity.Design/methodology/approachThis study introduces three analyst specific variables as proxies of information asymmetry as the conventional proxies are fraught with several disadvantages. First, the paper tests the choice between rights issue and private placement using a binary logistic model. In the second approach the authors use rights issue and segregate the private placements into preferential allotments and qualified institutional placements and test the impact of information asymmetry using a multinomial logistic regression.FindingsThe outcome of this empirical exercise shows that only those firms facing lesser information problems choose rights issue of equity. Private placements are chosen by firms facing higher information problems to circumvent information costs. The results remain invariant even after segregating the qualified institutional placements from private equity placement as the firms with information disadvantage choose to place equity privately.Originality/valueIn contrast to the conventional studies that focus on the debt-equity framework, the authors argue that the impact of information asymmetry is applicable even at disaggregated levels of equity selling mechanism.

Long-term underperformance of public versus rights offering firms

The authors compare the post-issue stock and operating performance of rights issue versus public offer firms using Korean data. The authors find that the stock returns of rights issue firms are less negative than those of public offering firms during the three years subsequent to the seasoned equity offering. The authors further find that the profitability of rights offering firms is superior to those of public offering firms and that the ratio of sales to assets for rights issue firms is much higher over the post-issue period. The results substantiate Heinkel and Schwartz’s (1986) and Eckbo and Masulis’ (1992) theoretical models that posit firms with better quality tend to select the rights issue rather than public offer method when issuing seasoned equity.

Menstruation and Human Rights: Can We Move Beyond Instrumentalization, Tokenism, and Reductionism?

With the current momentum around menstruation, it is increasingly framed as a human rights issue. We see such language in UN documents and many organizations adopt the framing of human rights. Scholars have argued that “framing the issue as being about the right to safe, healthy and dignified menstruation moves it from being a negative problem to be solved” to “an affirmative principle through which the facts of women and girls’ lives are acknowledged and validated.” This paper seeks to briefly unpack what it means to approach menstruation through the lens of human rights. First, I will discuss the predominant way in which human rights framing is presently used and how it is at risk of instrumentalization, tokenism, and reductionism. However, I will also provide a more optimistic view and discuss what the human rights framework has to offer, building on grassroots perspectives as well as normative arguments.

Making the case for Community Interpreting in health care: from needs assessment to risk management

In Canada, community interpreting is little recognized and valued by public institutions, including those in the healthcare sector. Although many healthcare practitioners recognize the crucial role played by interpreters in delivering healthcare services, some of them ascribe to the notion that the inability to communicate with English-speaking or French-speaking patients is the patient ’s problem, and that any linguistic miscommunication which may occur is the responsibility of the patient. This attitude contributes to the degree to which healthcare practitioners rely on interpreting provided by family members, including children, without consideration either for risks of errors and omission or for potential violations of confidentiality, which are likely to occur when askingfriends or relatives to provide interpreting services. This “wall of resistance” has been deemed responsiblefor much of the difficulty experienced in Canada by immigrant and minority language advocacy groups in trying to ensure community interpreting services for immigrants, refugees and those Canadians with limited proficiency in English and/or French. A recently completed research studyfunded by the Government of Canada suggests that a paradigm shift may be operating in the healthcare sector, and that instead of still seeing language barriers solely as a human rights issue, language barriers should be considered from a risk-management perspective as well. This paper will review some of the mainfindings of this study.

What Are We Actually Talking About? Conceptualizing Data as a Governable Object in Overlapping Jurisdictions

Data form an increasingly essential element of contemporary politics, as both public and private actors extend claims of their legitimate control in diverse areas including health, security, and trade. This paper investigates data governance as a site of fundamental normative and political ordering processes that unfold in light of ever-increasing inter- and transnational linkages. Drawing on the concept of jurisdictional conflicts, the paper traces the evolution of data governance in three cases of transatlantic conflicts as diverging definitional claims over data. The paper argues that these conflicts reveal varying conceptualizations of data linked to four distinct visions of the social world. First, a conceptualization of data as an individual rights issue links human rights with the promotion of sovereignty to a vision of data governance as local liberalism. Second, proponents of a security partnership promote global security cooperation based on the conceptualization of data as a neutral instrument. Third, a conceptualization of data as an economic resource is linked to a vision of the digital economy that endorses progress and innovation with limited regulation. Fourth, a conceptualization of data as a collective resource links the values of universal rights and global rules to a vision of global protection.

The Framing of Gender-Based Violence Discourses in Mainstream Development: From a Human Rights Violation to a Development Barrier

This chapter discusses the emergence of gender-based violence (GBV) as a grassroots women’s organizations’ concern, and how it later became a human rights issue and a priority in the mainstream development agenda. The anti-GBV movement is deeply rooted in a human rights approach and on defending the right of women to a life free of violence. However, mainstream development and governmental initiatives have increasingly framed the fight against GBV in instrumental terms, situating GBV as an obstacle to development. The chapter uses a feminist lens to critically analyse mainstream discourses and their implications for policy and development programs aimed at reducing GBV rates.