Grand Challenges Lecture - 10th May


Posted on 05 May 2017
Professor Sally Wheeler - Global Business and the Challenge of Human Rights
10 May 2017 | 6.30 - 7.30pm | Keele Hall - The Salvin Room

The Grand Challenges lecture series is delighted to welcome its next speaker to Keele University, Professor Sally Wheeler.

The Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (ILAS) Grand Challenges Lecture series explores complex questions which confront local, national, regional and global communities. These grand challenges will require creative and innovative interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration to suggest and predict possible resolutions.

About the lecture

Global production of consumer goods and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the extraction of raw materials, takes place in developing countries. Lower wage costs, lower infrastructure costs and often a shallower regulatory climate have ensured that there is a relocation of sites of production away from Western countries with finished goods flowing back. Slave or child labour, very poorly remunerated employment, unsafe working conditions and life changing environmental damage are just some of the degradations visited by multi-national enterprises (MNEs) and their locally based sub-contractors upon the communities in which they are located. Between 2006-2011 the UN drafted, with the aid of its Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, the US academic John Ruggie, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

This lecture looks at how MNEs have responded to these Principles in terms of what rights they assert that they respect, how they report on this respect and the place that they accord respect for Human Rights in their business structure.

Sally Wheeler MIRA, FAcSS is Professor of Law, Business and Society and Head of the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast. A graduate of Oxford University, she has previously held Chairs at the University of Leeds and Birkbeck College London. She has a wide range of academic interests from Victorian Studies to Corporate Law and is author of over 80 books, book chapters and journal articles. In 2013 she was elected to the Royal Irish Academy.

Refreshments will be available in the Great Hall, adjacent to the Salvin Room from 6.00pm onwards.

This lecture is free and all are welcome to attend.