Holding corporations from middle countries accountable for human rights violations: a case study of the Vietnamese company investment in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Land grabbing in poor countries by transnational corporations has been increasing, causing great concern over human rights violations in countries where states often lack the ability or will to regulate the conduct of foreign-owned companies. Civil society organizations have played a significant role in attempts to hold companies from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries accountable for human rights violations by their subsidiaries in poor countries. However, civil society pressure for accountability from companies whose home base is in non-OECD, middle-income, countries is rare. This paper explores the human rights impacts of the Cambodian operations of Vietnam’s Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) company, and how affected communities and NGOs in Cambodia have tried to hold HAGL accountable for its wrongdoing through approaching the Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman of the International Finance Corporation. This is an initial attempt to examine how civil society and affected communities have challenged a Vietnamese company with no prior record of engaging with players from outside its home territory about the human rights impacts of its investments in Cambodia.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational corporation
• human rights
• accountability
• middle-income country

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Jun Borras for bringing together and framing this special issue; to Natalie Bugalski at Inclusive Development International for her critical and useful comment on an earlier version of this paper; to two peer reviewers for their very helpful and encouraging comments and suggestions to improve the paper’s quality; and to staff at Equitable Cambodia for their contribution to the data collection of the Human Rights Impact Assessment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, John Ruggie, A/HRC/8/5, endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Resolution 17/4 of 16 June 2011.

2. For further details, see http://www.elc.maff.gov.kh/.

3. For further details, see LICADHO (2015).

4. Open Development Cambodia (2015).

5. Cambodia: Rights razed: Forced evictions in Cambodia, retrieved from http://www.refworld.org/docid/47b96a0e1a.html.

6. Global Witness (2013) and HAGL Group (2013).

7. For further details, see CAO (2013).

8. Report to the Human Rights Council of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A/HRC/EMRIP/2011/2, Annex: Expert Mechanism advice No. 2 (2011): Indigenous peoples and the right to participate in decision-making, paragraph 26.

9. Labor Code (1997), Article 177(4); and ILO Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138), Article 7 (ratified by Cambodia in 1999 and Vietnam in 2003).

10. See Land Law (2001), Article 15 and 58; and Sub-decree No. 146 (2005) on Economic Land Concessions, Article 4(1).

11. There were 17 villages that filed the complaint to the CAO. Three of them were not included in the impact assessment. HAGL confirmed that these three villages located outside its concession boundary, so they withdrew from the CAO mediation process.

12. For further details of the joint statement between HAGL and affected villages, see http://www.cao-ombudsman.org/cases/document-links/links-212.aspx.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ratha Thuon

Ratha Thuon is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague. Her research explores the ways CSOs in Cambodia access independent accountability mechanisms to seek redress for human rights violations.