Commentary: The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act should be a model for human rights
Early in his presidency, Trump disparaged and proposed eliminating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a landmark U.S. law that makes it illegal for U.S-listed companies to bribe foreign government officials... [W]e should be doing just the opposite–replicating, strengthening, and expanding it to tackle an issue largely uncovered by existing legislation: corporate human rights violations...
At the moment U.S. law does not expressly prohibit corporations from engaging in gross human rights crimes... Recent Supreme Court decisions have further undermined the use of U.S. Courts to hold corporations accountable for human rights crimes abroad... This gap in legal oversight used to exist in regards to corruption. The FCPA changed all that... Like Trump, corporations complained that the law would put them at a competitive disadvantage... [But] Major companies, even ethically dubious ones like ExxonMobil, even spoke out publicly in support of the law...
With a human rights version of the FCPA, if a U.S.-listed company was extorted by a paramilitary group or forced to pay a sketchy police unit, the company could cite the law as a reason for refusing to do so.