Fifty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even the most abusive governments at least pay lip service to its principles. They respond to United Nations initiatives and to those from private organizations such as mine, Human Rights Watch. But that's only half the story. In an era of global business in which more and more corporations routinely do business outside their home country, many of these companies still argue that they don't bear any responsibility for human rights in the places where they trade and invest. If protesters are beaten up, or people being tortured, it always is the host government that is to blame - never the companies.

In the last ten years, more and more corporations have addressed human-rights issues directly. The footwear and apparel industry was the first to respond, in part because the marketing for their product depended so heavily on a corporate image. A reputation for exploiting sweatshop labor damaged such an image. But the movement now reaches well beyond shoes and shirts. The 1995 execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental and democracy activist, galvanized protests around the role of Royal Dutch Shell and other oil companies in the Niger Delta. Shell has since announced a public human rights policy (and provided quite a nice website where you can go and examine it). What the policy means in practice, though, has yet to be seen.

American oil companies have argued that they are not responsible for human rights or that they improve rights simply through conducting business. But Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum don't think so and have done more than their American counterparts in the energy business to respect human rights.

But some lag far behind. Take the example of the Enron Corporation, a Houston-based conglomerate which is making the largest single foreign investment in India. It owns 50 percent of the Dabhol Power Corporation (together with Bechtel, General Electric, and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board), which is building the biggest private power plant in the world.

Innocent people were beaten up and arrested on trumped up charges, sometimes outside the very gates of Enron's power plant, because they were demonstrating against what they believe are the plant's adverse effects on the local environment and economy. The police committing these abuses are under the command of local headquarters, but the company pays their salaries. Enron cannot pretend it has no responsibility for what they do. Sub-contractors have attacked and beaten local villagers who opposed the plant. Did Enron tell them to do that? Probably not. But is Enron complicit in those abuses? Absolutely.

We reported this in a recently released 166 page report. The company denied responsibility for these acts and said that even though they pay the police, the company is "not responsible" for their actions. This would be news to local villagers, whose opposition to the project remains quashed by laws criminalizing even "chanting" and the "singing of songs."

There are specific and constructive steps that corporations can take to limit such complicity in human rights abuses. For example in Colombia, oil pipelines run through guerrilla-infested regions and the companies that own them need security forces to defend their property. But the Colombian military has a terrible human rights record and is known to cooperate with brutal paramilitaries. Human Rights Watch has advised the companies on strict vetting procedures that weed out these people from their payroll.

While recognizing that corporations are not rights agencies, we believe that the corporate sector has a critical role to play in enhancing respect for universally recognized human rights. A good human rights record is good for business. That is a bottom line we can all agree on.

* Arvind Ganesan tracks corporations and human rights issues for Human Rights Watch