Human rights are clearly at risk in business operations in the U.S., but it is rare that companies or media frame such issues in human-rights terms. To be sure, human rights are at greater risk in countries where the rule of law is weak and there is less robust media and civil society to hold both governments and companies to account. But that does not mean that human rights are fully protected in Western countries—as I learned during my time with BP.

In 2005 I was working for BP, based in the company’s London headquarters. I was collaborating with colleagues around the world from Azerbaijan to China to Indonesia to Russia to develop a new human-rights guidance note that staff could use with people in and outside of the company to discuss what human rights means for BP in practical terms.

On March 23 of that year, BP’s Texas City refinery near Galveston exploded, killing 15 people and injuring 170 more. Needless to say, a lot of BP staff were consumed by the aftermath of the incident. But I was not one of them. The Texas City explosion was framed as an industrial accident—a horrific one, to be sure—but never as a human-rights violation and therefore not part of my portfolio.

Even if Texas City had forged a link between my work on human rights and the company’s U.S. operations, would that have made a difference? Is there any chance that my engaging U.S. colleagues could have helped prevent the Deepwater Horizon explosion five years later? Could embracing the primacy of human rights and commissioning impact assessments accordingly—as I was part of doing for BP in developing countries—have made a difference in the Gulf of Mexico?

It is impossible to say with certainty that it would have. But some companies are adopting a human-rights-based approach, realizing how helpful it is in managing risks to both their bottom line and their stakeholders. Yahoo now conducts human-rights impact assessments before launching new products in new markets to protect privacy and free expression. Nestlé had the Danish Institute for Human Rights conduct an in-depth study of its policies and practices in seven countries. There are new tools for and examples of companies integrating human rights every month.

While the language of human rights seems foreign to businesspeople at first, its universality is helpful to global companies seeking consistency across the many different countries and cultures in which they operate. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the authoritative list of 30 rights and freedoms—agreed to in the wake of World War II by a group of delegates that included representatives from China and Lebanon as well as France and the U.S.—that no party, including companies, can violate.

There is no Universal Declaration of Corporate Social Responsibility or Sustainability, much to the frustration of companies who struggle to prioritize issues and stakeholders who have different views about what is important.