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Since the turn of the millennium, the European Union (EU) has sought to advance its policies on business and human rights with the aim of achieving specific outcomes on human rights protection, core labour standards, and a better alignment of European and global approaches to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). At the heart of this endeavour lies the European Commission’s renewed strategy for CSR in its 2011 Communication. This chapter critically analyses the impact of the EU’s re-calibration of its CSR policy to allow for the fuller engagement of European business with human rights on the internal and external plane. The EU has sought to develop a ‘smart mix’ of voluntary policy measures and complementary regulatory initiatives to achieve its aims. Consequently, it has made considerable progress towards embedding business and human rights in European law and policy. However, it continues to face challenges due to its lack of competence along the whole spectrum of business-related human rights, and the transversal character of EU policy, which elicits a multidimensional response to implementation, involving a plethora of actors from government, business, and civil society.

While the first part of the volume explores how transitional justice mechanisms and pressure for corporate accountability from below can address past atrocities, this chapter introduces the second half of the volume that focuses on the post-transition era. This chapter explores how a country’s past—accountability efforts for former state actors for human rights abuses—shapes its future and the ability to hold corporations accountable. Using the Corporations and Human Rights Database (CHRD), this chapter uses large-N data from Latin America to explore the following questions: Do accountability efforts for state-sponsored human rights abuses in the past affect access to remedy for corporate human rights abuses in the post-transition era? Does accountability from below in one historical moment shape accountability in another? Or, is access to remedy limited, as it is a function of entrenched economic interests and veto players? 

The objective of this chapter is to examine the extent to which the human rights system in Nigeria is being repositioned to engage the increasing influx of international economic players and to bring transnational economic entities in compliance with local and international human rights standards. This enquiry is necessary, since the chapter is based on the assumption that the confluence of business with human rights is the platform for sustainable investment and development in Nigeria. Taking the negative consequences of the oil business in Nigeria as an example, the chapter argues that the interface of business and human rights is in desperate need of radical reform.

This chapter analyses how selfless jurisdictional intervention plays out in respect of two ‘global values’ or ‘common interests’ which occupy a central place in the contemporary global justice discourse: human rights and environmental concerns. In particular, the chapter zooms in on instances of unilateral jurisdiction aimed at regulating business activities which adversely affect human rights and the environment. It is divided into four parts: the exercise of port state jurisdiction over foreign-flagged vessels engaged in illegal, unreported or unsustainable fishing, or which endanger the marine environment on the high seas; the imposition of trade measures in pursuit of global environmental objectives; the exercise of adjudicatory jurisdiction over corporate human rights abuses; and the territorial extension of data protection legislation to protect citizens’ data privacy from abuses committed and facilitated by Internet intermediaries.

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are an example where soft law arguably takes on a primary role in the human rights field. This chapter argues that the Guiding Principles are a challenging, and sometimes confusing, instrument for public international law and international human rights law in terms of form and content. It is therefore important to clarify the nature and the contents of the Guiding Principles and analyse the effects of the emergence of such soft law instruments. The author acknowledges that the Guiding Principles have played a catalyst role in bringing together relevant human rights obligations in a set of soft law standards addressing both states and business enterprises. However, by associating corporate social responsibility discourse and actual legal obligation in the same instrument, it also becomes more difficult to distinguish the mandatory elements from the voluntary ones within the field of human rights and business.

This chapter assesses the challenges posed by the implementation of business and human rights standards, especially the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Although SMEs make up between 85 and 99 per cent of global enterprises, they have not been directly involved in the crafting of these standards and this coupled with the traditional focus on transnational enterprises gives a flavour of the formidably challenging context in which the UNGPs are to be implemented. Drawing on lessons from related disciplines such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental sustainability, the chapter explores the implications for human rights of issues such as SME identity, organizational structures, and their place in supply chains. The chapter concludes that the challenges are not overwhelming, especially if the unique characteristics of SMEs such as their flexibility, adaptability, and clear leaderships can be leveraged to achieve the objectives of the business and human rights standards.

Part III, ‘Empirical Perspectives’, contains only one chapter, Chapter 5, which presents the results of a cross-case analysis of national human rights action plans of fifty-three countries. Adopting a purposive sampling technique, these countries are selected on the basis of four main criteria, namely human rights record, geographical diversity, political regimes, and cultural diversity. This comprehensive cross-case study follows two objectives. The first objective of this chapter is to unearth significant problems in the ‘pre-phase’ and the four phases of planning, namely ‘preparatory phase’, ‘development phase’, ‘implementing phase’, and ‘assessment phase’. These problems are significantly detrimental to the effective implementation of human rights and their identification will substantially help generate response strategies. These are best addressed by attempting to mitigate their root causes as opposed to only correcting the immediately obvious symptoms. This brings us to the chapter’s second objective, which is to explore the underlying causes of these problems.

Part II, ‘Doctrinal Perspectives’, is structured in two chapters: Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. Chapter 4, which is concerned with the state’s compliance with the obligation to adopt a National Human Rights Action Plan (NHRAP), addresses two sets of questions. The first section of Chapter 4 examines the question as to whether states are expected to adopt separate rights-specific action plans or just one global action plan covering all the rights (and rights-related topics) at once. By adopting a mixed methods approach, including a qualitative textual analysis, a quantitative content analysis, and a fuzzy-set method, the second section of this chapter attempts to clarify the ‘obligation to take all appropriate measures’ (OTAAM) from which the obligation to adopt a national human rights action plan is derived. It seeks to address the questions as to what ‘measure’ and ‘appropriateness’ mean in international human rights law? How to determine the degree of appropriateness of each measure taken by the state?

The chapter examines the added potential of the Hague Rules on Business and Human Rights Arbitration (Hague Rules) to solve disputes on compliance by businesses with human rights obligations compared to certain international judicial and arbitral institutions that have dealt with such disputes. Despite commendable efforts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), investor-state arbitral tribunals, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) all suffer from deficiencies that stand in the way of their delivering a genuinely ‘effective’ adjudication of BHR disputes under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Combining the flexibility and transnational nature of arbitration with an ad hoc structure and mandate, injected with human rights and BHR-specific values and principles, the Hague Rules represent one effective avenue to prevent and redress violations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) obligations committed by businesses.

This chapter argues that in addition to the classical preparatory function of soft law, the Guiding Principles may also be seen as an example of soft law fulfilling a more pragmatic role to ensure an output-oriented, multi-layer governance approach. This process is characterized by institutionalized stakeholder involvement and a general openness towards alternative regulatory approaches. It is too early to say whether the Guiding Principles will induce a sustainable behavioural change of states and corporations, yet the use of soft law ended the previously deadlocked international discussions on how to frame corporate responsibilities in the business and human rights nexus. This may well prove to be the most important impact of the Guiding Principles and serve as a model of inspiration for other difficult areas of human rights.

Corporations have limited responsibilities in international law but enjoy far-reaching rights and privileges. International legal debates often conceive of this issue as a problem of business accountability for human rights violations. Conceptually, the issue of corporations in international law has focused on whether or not they are, or ought to be, recognized as ‘subjects’ of responsibility in international law and on the adequate conceptual analogy to the corporation. The introduction presents an alternative way of thinking about the role of international law and its relevance to the private business corporation. It traces the emergence of the contemporary legal architecture for corporations in international law and shows how modern international law constitutes a framework within which businesses and governments allocate resources and responsibilities—a framework that began to operate as early as the late-nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth century.

Richard Meeran explains the genesis of tort-based multinational human rights litigation in the United Kingdom, including some striking features, events, and judgments in original cases of Connelly v. Rio Tinto, Ngcobo v. Thor Chemical, and Lubbe v. Cape plc cases and their impact on the development of English law relating parent company liability leading to the precedents in the Chandler v. Cape, Vedanta, and Okpabi v. Shell cases. He offers insights on strategic litigation from these and other multinational cases. He outlines the key legal, procedural, and practical barriers to justice for victims, with particular emphasis on forum non conveniens, funding litigation, and the interrelationship of the barriers in deterring victims’ lawyers. He considers the concurrent development and integration of multinational human rights litigation and business and human rights including in the UN Guiding Principles. He outlines the potential for cross-border collaboration between lawyers to pursue cases in multinational host States.

Chapter 6 assesses the prospects for policy reform in the business and human rights field, pointing to the emergence of a worker-driven social responsibility (WSR) model distinct from conventional multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI). The chapter compares the two approaches, analyzes their relative strengths, and argues for pragmatic yet bold new approaches to addressing human rights violations and community members’ right to remedy in the context of light manufacturing. The chapter draws on original participant observation data from a 2017 international conference on these themes, along with primary and secondary source data on emerging methods of community engagement underway in key business sectors within the United States, Bangladesh, and several other settings. It helps place the Dominican cases and the large-N data explored in other chapters in a broader policy framework, drawing special insights from systems engineering theory on problem-solving in failure-prone settings.

This chapter provides an overview of the book, situating it as a contribution to debates in political science as well as business and human rights literatures. The puzzle central to the book is presented: Does the practice of “stakeholder consultation” contribute to fulfilling the economic rights of people who live in manufacturing communities integral to global supply chains? Why or why not, and under what conditions? This introductory chapter positions the book within broader scholarly debates over the nature of remedy for human rights abuse. It also explores why existing modes of consultation often fall short of addressing the underlying structural factors that perpetuate poverty in manufacturing communities globally (thus bridging literatures on the political economy of grassroots development and industrialization). The chapter previews the empirical contributions of the book—specifically, its engagement with multiple methods and multiple sources of data (e.g., historical, statistical, interview, and participant observation–based data) aimed at uncovering the challenges of stakeholder consultation in theory and practice. The chapter concludes by outlining the succeeding chapters briefly.

The epilogue summarizes the main findings of the book and explores their broader implications for political science theory, public policy, and corporate supply chain management. It highlights the need for a broad range of data on stakeholder dialogue, from historical to quantitative to qualitative (such as the trend analysis derived from Business and Human Rights Resource Centre data, and the insights of community members gathered through interviews in manufacturing towns, respectively). The epilogue foregrounds our fragile connections along the global supply chain and reiterates the need for innovative approaches to community engagement in settings where the risks of economic rights failure are high but the rewards of more just and equitable development are potentially deep.