CORPORATE REPARATIONS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN LATIN AMERICA. A GENDER-SENSITIVE APPROACH.

The body of international human rights acknowledges the right of victims of human rights violations to receive adequate, effective, and prompt reparations for the suffering they endured or continue to endure as part of their human right to remedy. Victims of corporate abuses, however, systematically struggle to obtain remedy, and where received, it frequently does not meet international standards. This is particularly the case of historically marginalized groups based on their gender, sex, disability, ethnicity, education, age, etc. Effective corporate reparations require being responsive to the experiences and expectations of victims. Hence, adopting a gender-sensitive approach is urgent. Otherwise, adopting gender-neutral approaches to reparations for corporate human rights violations contributes to perpetuating structural gender discrimination and causes new harm. This project aims to understand this ¿gender gap¿ in corporate reparations by shedding light on the causes and mechanisms that lead to it and providing a comprehensive understanding of the so far understudied corporate reparations phenomenon. Research Questions: the project aims to deliver an empirical and theoretical understanding of the factors that define the occurrence, content, and extent of corporate reparations for human rights abuses. The following interrelated research questions are at the heart of our project: (1a) What would gender transformative reparations look like in the corporate context? (1b) When, where, and what type of corporate reparations occur, and whether and how a gender approach is incorporated? (2) What determines the occurrence, content, and extent of corporate reparations for human rights abuses, and how are these trends explained? To answer these questions, the project implements a mixed-methods design consistent with feminist approaches to research methods where the voices and experiences of victims are central. An initial five-case study qualitative comparison will produce a set of indicators to measure the gender dimension of harm and reparations. These insights will crucially underpin the quantitative exercise, where the Corporate Human Rights Database will be updated, expanded, and analyzed to continue testing the hypothesess. Theoretical foundations: Corporate human rights reparations are complex and multifaceted. As such, we anchor our research design on the fields of business and human rights, gender studies, sociology, and law, reflecting the complementary backgrounds of our research team. Human Rights literature on reparations provides us with the language and conceptual categories to set our dependent variables. Social mobilization theory allows us to test the capacity of victims to organize themselves and whether and how they receive gender-transformative reparations (H1). Management and political economy inform our hypothesis on how the economic relevance of a company, may impact gender-sound reparations (H2, H3, H4). Finally, the legal scholarship allows us to test whether the type of abuse and the degree of gender sensitivity of a given legal system affects reparations (H5, H6). Contribution: Most of the extant scholarly literature concerning corporate reparations remains theoretical or normatively grounded. Thus, the project goes beyond extant literature by grounding its contributions on a unique large-scale empirical effort comprising a mixed-methods approach. It provides an exhaustive and comprehensive descriptive account of which corporate reparations occur, and a seminal theoretical contribution explaining how institutional, legal context and victim mobilization factors influence them. This initiative also aspires to translate its scholarly contributions to policy discussions, foster and influence the broader public debate on corporate accountability, and nurture the scholarly capacities of its members.