Human Rights Obligations of Business

Beyond the Corporate Responsibility to Respect?

Surya Deva, David Bilchitz

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781107036871
• eBook ISBN: 9781107596801
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits de l'homme

In recent years, the UN Human Rights Council has approved the 'Respect, Protect, and Remedy' Framework and endorsed the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These developments have been welcomed widely, but do they adequately address the challenges concerning the human rights obligations of business? This volume of essays engages critically with these important developments. The chapters revolve around four key issues: the process and methodology adopted in arriving at these documents; the source and justification of corporate human rights obligations; the nature and extent of such obligations; and the implementation and enforcement thereof. In addition to highlighting several critical deficits in these documents, the contributing authors also outline a vision for the twenty-first century in which companies have obligations to society that go beyond the responsibility to respect human rights.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword: beyond the guiding principles
• Preface
• 1 The human rights obligations of business: a critical framework for the future
• Part I Process and methodology
• 2 Navigating from ‘train wreck’ to being ‘welcomed’: negotiation strategies and argumentative patterns in the development of the UN Framework
• 3 The ‘Ruggie process’: from legal obligations to corporate social responsibility?
• 4 Treating human rights lightly: a critique of the consensus rhetoric and the language employed by the Guiding Principles
• Part II Source and justification of corporate obligations
• 5 A chasm between ‘is’ and ‘ought’? A critique of the normative foundations of the SRSG’s Framework and the Guiding Principles
• 6 The corporate responsibility to respect human rights: soft law or not law?
• 7 Closing the governance gap in the business and human rights arena: lessons from the anti-corruption movement
• Part III Nature and extent of corporate obligations
• 8 Business, human rights and gender: a legal approach to external and internal considerations
• 9 Due diligence and complicity: a relationship in need of clarification
• 10 Making noise about silent complicity: the moral inconsistency of the ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework
• Part IV Implementation and enforcement
• 11 When human rights ‘responsibilities’ become ‘duties’: the extra-territorial obligations of states that bind corporations
• 12 Will transnational private regulation close the governance gap?
• 13 An analysis and practical application of the Guiding Principles on providing remedies with special reference to case studies related to oil companies
• 14 Access to remedy: the United Kingdom experience of MNC tort litigation for human rights violations
• Index