The process of globalization have seen transnational corporations and other business play an increasingly important role. The growing reach and impact of business enterprises have given rise to a debate about the roles and responsibilities of such actors with regard to human rights. Over the past decade, the United Nations human rights machinery has been exploring ways for corporate actors to be accountable for the impact of their activities on human rights.
More than thirty years ago, on 2 October 1979, His Holiness John Paul II addressed to the 34th General Assembly of the United Nations the following words: «In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the other international and national juridical instruments are endeavouring to create general awareness of the dignity of the human being, and to define at least some of the inalienable rights of man […] the right to life, liberty and security of person; the right to food, clothing, housing, sufficient health care, rest and leisure; the right to freedom of expression, education and culture; the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the right to manifest one’s religion either individually or in community, in public or in private; the right to choose a state of life, to found a family and to enjoy all conditions necessary for family life; the right to property and work, to adequate working conditions and a just wage; the right of assembly and association; the right to freedom of movement, to internal and external migration; the right to nationality and residence; the right to political participation and the right to participate in the free choice of the political system of the people to which one belongs. All these human rights taken together are in keeping with the substance of the dignity of the human being, understood in his entirety, not as reduced to one dimension only. These rights […] always and everywhere […] concern man, they concern man’s full human dimension […]».
