Five strategies used by companies to avoid responsibility (for human rights and environmental impacts) are constructing deniability, avoiding liability through judicial strategies, distracting and obfuscating, undermining defenders and communities and utilising state power (Mind The Gap)

The five strategies and 25 sub-strategies identified by Mind The Gap are:

1. Constructing deniability: Companies may attempt to “obscure their involvement in harmful business practices” to avoid scrutiny or preclude investigations into their practices and supply chains by:

• • • Hiding behind complex supply chains;
    • Outsourcing high-risk activities;
    • Outsourcing recruitment and employment;
    • Disengaging irresponsibly; and
    • Refusing to disclose

2. Avoiding liability through judicial strategies: Corporations can avoid legal liability for harms—thereby undermining victims’ access to remedy—by leveraging sophisticated legal strategies and opaque business structures, including:

• • • Abusing judicial process;
    • Engaging in jurisdiction shopping;
    • Shielding parent companies;
    • Settling cases; and
    • Taking States to international arbitration

3. Distracting and obfuscating: Businesses can use media and hide behind their brand platform to avoid taking responsibility for their human rights impacts, which is “problematic if it means that legitimate community, worker or public interests are disregarded or only responded to in a cosmetic, superficial manner.” Companies do this by:

• • • Symbolically engaging communities;
    • Disseminating distorted information;
    • Engaging in fraudulent activities;
    • Manipulating scientific research;
    • Abusing standards; and
    • Diverting complaints through company-controlled mechanisms

4. Undermining defenders and communities: Companies may directly or indirectly use their power to “silence communities and human rights defenders in order to continue their business operations,” in an effort to continue harmful business practices unopposed by advocates. They do this by:

• • • Attacking human rights defenders;
    • Filing lawsuits to intimidate critics;
    • Criminalising human rights defenders;
    • Dividing communities; and
    • Undermining unionisation

5. Utilising state power: Corporations can use their political and economic influence to pressure states and “obtain favourable treatment, security and impunity.” They may also help governments undermine human rights defenders and activists for their own gain. Companies can do this by:

• • • Exploiting governance gaps created by states;
    • Avoiding regulations through corporate lobbying;
    • Aligning with repressive state institutions; and
    • Engaging State security forces

Mind The Gap also published a series of case studies to demonstrate how companies are using these strategies in practice.