by John F. Sherman III

The Business and Human Rights Centre’s (BHRC) June 2026 survey of US corporate human rights practice describes unpublicised efforts by companies to cut back on their human rights staff, redirect what remains toward legal compliance, and sideline the people whose job was to understand the external impact of business decisions on people and the environment.

My immediate reaction: I’ve seen this movie before. I wrote about it 16 years ago. It echoes BP’s 2010 Macondo well blowout – an environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the company’s failure to adequately assess and address the risks of its operations.

The 2010 Macondo well blowout

On April 20, 2010, BP’s Macondo oil well blew out, causing the Deepwater Horizon rig to explode, killing 11 workers and releasing nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf, the largest offshore oil spill in US history. The environmental and human consequences were catastrophic: hundreds of thousands of birds, marine mammals, and sea turtles were killed; hundreds of miles of coastline were contaminated; Gulf Coast fishing and tourism communities were devastated. The disaster ultimately cost BP more than USD 60 billion.

In 2011, a US Presidential Commission concluded that both industry and government were unprepared to respond to a massive deepwater oil spill, even though one was foreseeable, and that BP lacked the response capabilities it claimed.

“We had ‘too many people that were trying to save the world’”

In 2009, less than a year before the blowout, Tony Hayward, BP’s new CEO, told a Stanford Business School audience that the company had “too many people that were trying to save the world.” His solution was to redirect employees to their operational tasks.

When CEOs speak like this, the rest of the company listens. This speech elevated myopia to a corporate value. It directed executives, engineers, and managers not to look beyond their immediate tasks.

Hayward’s message was not directed at any one group. Earlier, during a prior CEO’s tenure, BP had commissioned its business and human rights team to conduct the world’s first corporate human rights impact assessment for its Tangguh LNG project in Indonesia, work entirely separate from deepwater operations. Nevertheless, that team had no illusions that Hayward considered them ‘people trying to save the world’.

The myopia of staying in your lane

The BHRC survey data describes a version of that same choice being made today:

• Staff cuts of 20-30% in human rights-related roles at some major US companies,
• Budget cuts of 50-75% at others, and
• Human rights functions absorbed by legal departments and reoriented toward disclosure management.

These cutbacks are not as explicit as Tony Hayward’s statement. But in these quiet cuts to human rights capacity and silent retreat from commitments, these companies send a similar message.

The people being let go are those whose job is to engage with stakeholders, assess impacts on people and the environment, and feed that intelligence into risk evaluation. When they go, the company’s ability to see how it affects people and the environment outside its immediate operational lane goes with them. As the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework notes, severe human rights impacts are closely linked to business risk.

Why legal compliance alone cannot fill the gap

The retreat from human rights commitments and the shift to legal compliance reflect a failure to address the governance problem the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) were designed to solve. John Ruggie identified the core issue: business can cause or contribute to human rights harm that states do not require companies to address. Pillar II of the UNGPs, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, was designed to operate beyond what hard law requires. A company can fully comply with applicable law yet still cause or contribute to human rights harm.

When hard law is not coextensive with protecting people and the environment (and, globally, coverage is quite patchy), a predominant legal-compliance approach leaves actual and potential impacts undetected and unaddressed. The company is exposed to the consequences of harm it chooses not to see beyond legal compliance.

That gap is narrowing in the EU, but expanding in the US. The current US posture, for example, entails undermining the rule of law, rolling back ESG requirements, and signalling indifference to international human rights frameworks. In that environment, the soft law of the UNGPs is more important, not less.

What does this mean for lawyers?

The International Bar Association concluded in 2016 and again in 2023 that law firms should advise on soft-law business and human rights impacts. If corporate responsibility extends beyond hard law, advice that stops at hard law is incomplete and far less valuable to clients. Soft law bites hard if violated.

The American Bar Association’s Resolution 604, adopted in August 2024, urged lawyers to avoid enabling clients’ human rights abuses and to advise clients of their responsibilities under the UNGPs. A lawyer who ignores how legal advice may enable human rights abuse serves neither the lawyer’s nor the client’s interests.

Conclusion

The evidence on corporate retreat documented by BHRC reveals a moment of institutional contraction that, from the outside, appears to be efficient cost management. Viewed through the lens of the UNGPs, it looks like something else: a generation of companies simultaneously removing the people and processes that allow them to see what they are doing to people and the environment, just when that capacity is most needed.

John Sherman, a US national, practiced law for many years as deputy general counsel of National Grid. On retirement, he joined Professor John Ruggie’s core UN mandate team as his senior legal advisor. Following that, he served as Shift’s senior advisor and general counsel for 12 years. He has been very active with the IBA and the ABA in promoting the integration of the UNGPs into legal practice. All opinions stated in this piece are solely his own.