Business meets human rights

Abstract

A major issue of the role of non-trade values in international trade is the expansion of international human rights obligations to multinational enterprises and other non-state actors, NGOs, who are considered, at most, merely secondary subjects of international law. The 2011 UN Human Rights Council’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP), destined to implement the UN “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework, was the first to set a global standard for addressing the risk of adverse impact on human rights linked to business activity. Since the UNGP is not a non-binding instrument, in 2014, the UN Human Rights Council set up an intergovernmental working group to work out a binding international instrument regulating the human rights aspects of the activities of transnational corporations. In parallel to this, the US Supreme Court in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (2013) and Jesner v. Arab Bank (2018) narrowed down the room for litigation under the Alien Tort Statute, which signals the shrinking availability of remedies under national law against multinational corporations’ human rights violations. This chapter addresses, in the context of the foregoing background, the points of intersection and clash between business and human rights, such as, which enterprises should be covered by international rules, how can direct applicability to enterprises be ensured, how to formulate extraterritorial jurisdiction in business and human rights matters?