Maybe we have seen headlines, such as Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer, has been accused of overstating its profits by £250 million by delaying the payment date of its suppliers without notice or deducting cash from its suppliers’ trading account. This practice is considered to have violated the UK Groceries Supply Code of Practice.

BBC Panorama has also broadcasted its investigation into the life of workers involved in the production of Apple’s products. Panorama indicated that child labourers had been involved in Apple’s supply chain in Indonesia, and safe working conditions have not been provided by factories that manufactured various Apple’s products in China.

The subsequent failures of business in practice are acknowledged as the results of a lack of ethics and social responsibility within business environments. In other words, there has been an ethical leadership crisis on business leaders.

It cannot be denied that this crisis, in part, indicates the poverty of business education as it has played a major role in training business leaders. Therefore, there have been insistent calls made by academics and professionals for the incorporation of more ethical values and social responsibilities into business education.

One of the emerging agendas of business ethics is the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. For example, it becomes an eminent issue because, for example, in its Human Development Report, UNDP (2000) stated that global corporations have tremendous impacts on human rights–in their employment practices or in their environmental impact.

Indeed, over the last four decades, we have witnessed that business organizations, especially multinational enterprises, have become more powerful than many nation-states, in which, for example, their financial resources exceed the gross domestic product (GDP) of a state, and in some cases, their political roles have been more influential than states.

Thus, the protection of human rights is no longer an exclusive duty of the states. In so doing, in 2011, the UN published Guiding Principles (GPs) on business and human rights, which back three main values: (1) states have a responsibility to protect its population from human rights abuses by companies; (2) companies have a duty to respect human rights, regardless of whether states fulfil their obligation seriously or not; (3) states and companies have a duty to ensure that the victims of human rights violations have access to an effective remedy.

In the case of the European Union, in order to meet business obligations on human rights, it has recently issued human rights guidance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and plan to publish the same guidance for corporations in three industries: oil and gas; information and communications technology and employment and recruitment agencies.

Indonesia is also following the global development on this matter. For example, a conference about business and respect for human rights was held in Jakarta last year to help business leaders understanding the issues surrounding business and human rights and particularly how to implement the GPSs in business practice in Indonesia.

This movement indicates that business responsibilities for protecting human rights are at the central foci of global development. Hence, business schools where future business leaders are trained and educated should be aware of this development. They need to be prepared to deal with more complex business practices in the future, particularly in relation to the protection of human rights.

Nonetheless, there has been a growing awareness in various business schools in the UK and US to teach human rights to business students. Stern Business School of New York University has even recently established the Center for Business and Human Rights. This indicates that teaching and researching human rights are no longer exclusively centred at the School of Law.

In that spirit, business schools in Indonesia should not be ignoring the need to bring change into business practice by incorporating human rights issues into business education. Nevertheless, one would ask what and how to teach the discourse of business and the protection of human rights.

Regarding what to teach, business and human rights education might address issues such as the nature of human rights; human rights laws and principles; the ways companies negatively and positively impact human rights; the notion of corporate accountability and responsibility in relation to the protection of human rights; the relationship between human rights and sustainability; and the notion that corporate violations of human rights might be influenced by certain economic worldview.

In terms of how to teach, as practised in some universities in the UK and US, those issues have been covered within the business ethics module or a stand-alone module of business and human rights. It has become a compulsory module for business students.

However, I believe that business and human rights issues could be introduced within the introductory financial accounting module, which is mandatory to all business students and offered at a very early stage of the business degree program. This idea is an effort to prevent business students from being quickly deprived of accounting and business activities’ social and moral basis.

As generally known that the nature of contemporary accounting has been about fulfilling human rights, but it dominantly concerns satisfying the rights of shareholders, whereas the protection of the rights of other stakeholders has been ignored. Moreover, teaching human rights in this module could answer the critics of academics that accounting courses are narrowly inculcated by technicist worldview.

In essence, the inclusion of human rights into business education is to enhance the critical literacy of future business leaders by facilitating their intellectual capacity about business ethics, especially on the notion of corporate obligations to respect human rights. Hence, they are aware and able to debate and criticize human rights issues. More importantly, by incorporating human rights into business education, business students could be prevented from being solely socialized with the tenet of shareholder wealth maximization.