Corporate Responsibility in 2025: An Interview With ICAR’s Advocacy Counsel
Labor 411 editor, Sahid Fawaz, spoke with Jacqueline Lewis, who is an Advocacy Counsel at the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR). At ICAR, she advocates for advancing legal and regulatory mechanisms combating corporate human rights and environmental abuses in the United States and across global supply chains and works toward building an economy that works for everyone. Jacqueline holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies and was a 2021 recipient of Georgetown Law’s Bettina Pruckmayr Award for Human Rights.
SF: Can you tell us a little about what ICAR does?
JL: ICAR is a coalition of over 40 organizations, including labor rights organizations and NGOs with the overall mission to fight corporate abuse of people and the planet. We take a systemic approach to corporate accountability that addresses both the way that corporations consolidate power and the way they wield that power against people and the environment.
To do this, we have three general pillars of work. The first is combating excess corporate influence on government, or what we refer to as “corporate capture.” Corporate capture is certainly not new in the United States, but right now, we are seeing flagrant, systematic attacks on our democracy by billionaires and corporate interests. We know that when corporations have outsized influence over our public institutions, they can manipulate our legislative and regulatory processes to favor corporate interests over the public and ultimately erode our democracy. So, one of the foundations for fighting corporate abuse is limiting the ability of corporations to tip the scales in their favor at the outset.
The second pillar is ensuring that people, including journalists, unions, and lawyers have the freedom to speak out against corporate abuse. This means that these essential human rights defenders should not be subject to baseless lawsuits and other efforts of intimidation meant to silence them. This area of our work focuses on fighting the use of strategic lawsuits against public participation, also known as SLAPP suits, where companies file trumped-up cases against these defenders and drag them through expensive lawsuits for years in an attempt to effectively silence them. ICAR’s work attempts to combat these anti-democratic tactics.
The third pillar is focused on enacting common-sense legal safeguards against corporate abuse and establishing incentives and disincentives that can improve corporate behavior. This area of our work includes advocating for protections for workers and communities in the United States and in global supply chains as well as pushing for legislation mandating supply chain tracing and human rights and environmental due diligence. Most importantly, ICAR advocates for creating real consequences and accountability for companies when they cause harm across global supply chains.
Without mandated supply chain tracing and due diligence, it is incredibly difficult to try to connect companies to their suppliers in the web of contracts and subcontracts. In the aftermath of the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh—when over 1,000 people, mostly garment workers, lost their lives—advocates scrambled to sift through the rubble, looking for garment tags that might indicate what brands were sourcing there so that they could trace garments from the source to the brands. Sometimes, in order to hold corporations accountable for abuses in global supply chains, advocates literally are following trucks or running DNA tests. This is part of why we need mandated traceability and due diligence conducted by companies and a way to hold them accountable when they cause harm
Part of this work on enacting legal safeguards also includes leveraging the United States’s market power to incentivize more responsible business conduct. For example, the United States is the largest single purchaser in the global economy, and is therefore uniquely positioned to drive significant changes in the ways that goods are sourced and produced globally. So, if we advocate for stronger human rights protections in the federal procurement process, companies who want to contract with the government may be incentivized to improve their business practices.
SF: How did you end up at ICAR?
JL: I went to law school in order to do human rights work, so when I graduated I was thrilled to join the ICAR team, initially as a Legal and Policy Fellow, and now as an Advocacy Counsel. ICAR does a great mix of advocating for domestic human rights legislation and enforcement of that legislation while still being connected to the global community of human rights advocates, which was really appealing to me. Prior to joining ICAR, I had worked on a number of human rights issues, ranging from refugee law, labor rights, and the protection of civic space. ICAR ended up being a great fit, considering how corporate abuse can touch so many different areas of the law.
SF: What are some current ICAR campaigns?
JL: One piece of our current work is advocating for the United States to more effectively leverage its market power to strengthen the protection of human rights in its supply chains by improving laws related to federal procurement. We just convened a strategy meeting with a number of groups, including the Alliance for Responsible Apparel Manufacturing and Purchasing (ARAMP), to develop and create a clear vision of advocacy priorities related to this work.
We are also currently working on a draft of a mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence bill modeled after the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The bill would require reporting and recordkeeping by certain companies related to their human rights and environmental risks and practices and allow an opportunity for remedy where covered companies engage in violations.
A lot of our work right now has also focused on countering recent attacks on pillars of corporate accountability in the United States, documenting the cuts and corporate capture that make accountability even more of an uphill battle.
To read some of our recent statements and publications, visit https://icar.ngo/news/. To learn more about ICAR, visit https://icar.ngo/.
