Read our latest Impact Report.
Our impact
Our Beginings
We have a proud history of coming together with our partners to make change. We were formed in the late 1990s when the Labour Government announced its plan to review company law. We started as an informal ‘Corporate Accountability Network’ (CAN) led by the New Economics Foundation and Traidcraft (now Transform Trade), with participants including Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Our founding partners put together what became a private members bill, known as the ‘Corporate Responsibility Bill’ and to reflect this, CAN became CORE, the Corporate Responsibility Coalition.
We’ve been changing the rules on corporate justice for more than 20 years
THE COMPANIES ACT
After years of campaigning, involving the UK public in their tens of thousands, our campaigning vision became a legislative reality with the introduction of the Companies Act in 2006 – a world-leading law requiring UK company directors to consider the impacts of their operations on the community and the environment.
The UN Guiding Principles
Ahead of the 2011 unanimous adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), CORE had been calling for a UK company reporting regime in a report with a foreword by Labour MP Lisa Nandy. We then engaged extensively in the work undertaken by Professor John Ruggie which led to the UNGPs.
Rules on transparency and reporting.
We later worked alongside partners in Europe on the 2014 EU Non-Financial Reporting directive, a tool for improved corporate transparency.
We then successfully campaigned for the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act to include a clause requiring companies to report on what they are doing to address slavery and human trafficking in their global supply chains. We’ve since called for reforms to strengthen the act, as well as highlighting that transparency without enforcement cannot end corporate abuses of people and planet.
More recent successes
From 2019 through to 2021 we contributed to successive landmark victories in the UK Supreme Court which have given a new and vitally important understanding of the ‘duty of care’ held by UK parent companies for the harmful actions of their overseas subsidiaries: Vedanta vs Lungowe, and, Okpabi v Shell.
Most recently, in 2024, we saw the EU pass the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, introducing new requirements for large EU companies to carry out human rights and environmental due diligence across their operations and value chains. CJC worked closely with EU partners as part of the European Coalition for Corporate Justice to help advocate for this legislation.
A BusiNEss Human Rights And Environment ACT
Our latest campaign builds on the legacy of more than 20 years’ work – we’re calling for a law requiring UK companies to prevent human rights abuses and environmental damage throughout their supply chains and operations, and to be held legally accountable when they fail to do so.