Human Rights Due Diligence, Information Asymmetry, and the Limits of Good-Level Transparency in Global Value Chains

At a Glance

What the audit found

Abstract

Summary

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights establish a corporate responsibility to prevent and account for adverse human rights impacts across value chains, including those arising through environmental harm. Fifteen years on, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights notes that accountability gaps persist.

Such gaps are addressed through several mechanisms; this study examines a precondition of one: demand-side pressure at the point of purchase. Labor rights violations cut production costs; certification without independent verification lets that saving hide behind a claim; and the premium paid for the certified good flows to the concealing firm rather than to remedy. Such pressure depends on evidence reaching the terminal node of the chain, and research makes that evidence necessary but not sufficient: disclosing concealment reduces intent toward the concealing actor, while price and availability still dominate what people buy. The study therefore asks not whether disclosure changes conduct, but whether the evidence it depends on is available at all.

Two propositions are tested: that the gap is one of distribution rather than absence, and that no single source class covers every dimension due diligence requires. Both hold. An audit of six goods found no assessor covering more than three of five dimensions, and no evidenced claim on the environmental or labor dimension for any good. A retrieval against commercial supply-chain intelligence was admissible for two dimensions and rejected for three: the inputs are largely public, but the entity resolution needed to use them is not.

The precondition is not met. A third proposition follows without separate test: any composite blends dimensions that are backed by entirely different bodies of evidence. The study specifies a non-compensatory architecture accordingly, and a rule for disclosing compliance-grade evidence to non-expert readers without implying harm it does not establish. Whether meeting the precondition delivers remedy is not tested here.

Keywords

Central Claims

Propositions tested

Contents

Table of contents

1. Aim, Problem, and Research Questions The problem, objectives, propositions, end-users, and the four research questions
2. Context and Literature The normative frame, scale of the harm, the concealment mechanism, and three gaps in the literature
3. Method Framework specification, confidence tiering, the audit design, and the Sayari source-admission test
4. Findings Coverage absence across six goods, persistence in commercial sources, and the four published outputs
5. Contribution A rendering standard for compliance-grade evidence, and a measurement instrument for future testing
6. Limitations The attribution problem, reach of the evidence, framework gaps, and the causal boundary
7. Conclusions and Future Research Five directions, including a display-architecture experiment and free-source replication

Appendices A–D — reproducibility statement, Sayari retrieval parameters, the downstream Value prong, and the assisted-research protocol. 42 footnotes with full source citations.

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