The deliberate ambiguity of the meaning of Just Business, the title of John Ruggie's new book, is emblematic of the different discourses in—and approaches to—the debate on business and human rights. For some, ‘just business’ means ‘business as usual’ or that the function of business is just that: business, not human rights enforcement. For others, human rights are just—good—business and respect for them is a basic social requirement of any citizen, corporate or otherwise. It is between those disparate narratives that John Ruggie navigated his mandate as Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. His book is a chronicle of the challenges and triumphs of so doing.

The book's first chapter details what was arguably the central challenge of Ruggie's mandate: the involvement of major multinational corporations in human rights abuses. The chapter looks in particular at the human rights concerns arising from the activities of Nike in Asia, Shell in Nigeria, Union Carbide in India and Yahoo! in China. The horror of those stories will not be lost on readers aware of the recent factory disasters in Bangladesh. As Ruggie points out, such stories are particularly apposite in an age where multinational corporations are ever-prevalent and often operate in difficult socio-political contexts. For the victims, those stories are also complicated by the veiled corporate structure and the use of offshore sourcing networks, which often depend upon contractual and subcontractual relationships, rather than direct dealings with the multinational in question.

Just Business also details how the difficulty of dealing with such problems has caused division: NGOs have typically advocated a treaty on corporate responsibility and human rights, whereas business has strongly resisted that proposition, denying responsibility or preferring voluntarism. In critiquing those different approaches and explaining his own, Ruggie reminds us eloquently of the responsibilities of corporations under international law and the advantages and disadvantages of attempting to negotiate treaties on controversial issues. His narrative is an insight into the process of policy-making UN-style and the shrewd strategising of a Harvard political mind.

Ruggie's solution to the business and human rights conundrum is ‘principled pragmatism’, enshrined in the Protect, Respect and Remedy framework, published in 2008, and the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, published in 2011. As Ruggie puts it, ‘The Framework addresses what should be done; the Guiding Principles how to do it’. The basic idea is that States must protect human rights, companies must respect human rights and those who are harmed must have redress. Ruggie's insight here is not just in what business must do to respect human rights but—in contradistinction to the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights—what they are not required to do. Corporations are to be regarded as ‘specialized organs, established to perform specialized economic functions’. As such, it is not their job to protect human rights where a State has failed to do so. Under the Guiding Principles, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights is discharged by putting in place a policy commitment to respect human rights; by conducting human rights ‘due diligence’ to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for a business's impact on human rights; and through remediation for any adverse human rights impacts a business causes or to which it contributes. In the absence of meaningful State regulation, Ruggie asserts that the motivation for corporates to discharge those responsibilities is social sanction and economic failure since businesses labour under a social licence to operate.

Unlike the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights, Ruggie's framework garnered the unanimous approval of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Ruggie's achievement is perhaps that he has moved the business and human rights debate beyond the dichotomy between human rights and corporate wrongs and the equation that no treaty means no solution. He has provided a framework that credibly claims to reflect international law but also harnesses the power of voluntarism by allowing States to build upon it and business innovate with it. For a human rights lawyer, however, Ruggie's solution might look rather too ‘soft’. Ruggie's answer to that charge appears to lie in the promise of tomorrow. He repeatedly emphasises that his work is just the ‘end of the beginning’. What is crucial to turning business's perverse human rights impacts into positive ones is how others will pick up his mantle. The interested student of business and human rights does not need to look very far from Ruggie himself to identify possible ways forward: in the business arena, Ruggie's colleague at Harvard, Michael Porter, suggests that businesses can actually profit from solving social problems, while human rights could benefit from the resource-generating capacity of business. At the United Nations, there are already frameworks—such as UNICEF's Children's Rights and Business Principles—that provide practical guidance for business on how to respect and support the human rights enshrined in specific treaties. Ruggie even sees signs of his framework crystallising into hard law in section 1502 of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which requires annual corporate disclosure of the measures taken to exercise ‘due diligence’ on the source and chain of custody of conflict minerals.

Indeed, the basis of the book's interest—or frustration—for an international legal audience is the lessons it offers on the way the law develops, from policy formation to the slow solidification of guiding principles into hard law and meaningful redress. For anyone interested in corporate social responsibility issues, the book also adds colour to the official UN publications on this topic, showing the policy decisions, compromises and aspirations those documents contain. For business leaders or general counsel on the boards of multinational businesses, the book impresses the importance of integrating human rights concerns into business strategy before they become a legal, public relations and financial liability. For all of those people, John Ruggie's book is essential reading. After all, it is only with their help that it will be possible to realise his vision that business too can be just.