United Nations special representative on human rights and business John Ruggie told MEPs on Thursday (16 April) that governments must step up to the plate and accept their role in preventing human rights abuses related to business... One failing in this area is the tendency of EU governments to define human rights excessively narrowly so that they are rarely mentioned in the domains that most affect EU businesses, such as corporate and investment law. As an example, Mr Ruggie pointed to...the government of South Africa['s]...legal dispute with an Italian mining company that wants to be re-imbursed for the economic effects of the country's black economic empowerment act... Jan Wouters, a professor with the Catholic University of Leuven told MEPs that the EU policy on corporate social responsibility was suffering from an implementation failure.