[danShumway]

It is possible (and in fact, expected) of companies that take these kinds of pledges to have a baseline set of human rights that most people (or at least most people on Apple's board) will agree on, even if there is ambiguity around the edges.

The alternative is saying, "we'll stand for this thing that we refuse to define in even vague terms, and as a result it will be impossible for anyone to evaluate whether or not we're succeeding, or even making progress."

If Apple can't determine even in broad terms what is and isn't a rights violation, then their declaration is meaningless. They don't need to decide for everyone, and not everyone needs to agree with them -- it's fine for other people and companies to come up with their own criteria. But Apple has to at least some internal idea of what they mean when they say they stand for something, otherwise it will be impossible for them to build real policies around the declaration.

And some of this honestly isn't that controversial among scholars. As an analogy, if I commit to avoiding stocking unhealthy products in my store, I don't need to know for certain whether or not coffee is healthy in order to say Cadbury Eggs are not -- pretty much everyone agrees on that. In the same way, we don't really need to debate whether or not healthcare is a human right to understand that forced abortions, forced monitoring and 'reeducation', and concentration camps for Uighurs are violations of their human rights.