Business & Human Rights

Mohsen al Attar and Rafael Quintero Godinez Investment is a heavy word. It stumbles rather than rolls off the tongue, perhaps because the speaker is aware of its convoluted character. It invokes images of factories, infrastructure, workers, money, and men (in suits or in hard hats, usually both). Most of all, investment conveys an evolutionary trajectory; one that is ideological and...

Events Conference on ‘International Criminal Law before Domestic Courts’: The University of Vienna in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights are pleased to announce the international conference ‘International Criminal Law before Domestic Courts’ taking place in Vienna from 14 until 16 October 2021. The conference will be held in a hybrid form at the Law Faculty of the...

Call for Papers Business Human Rights Conference: The IFIM Law School is organising a Research Colloquium on the theme of 'Business and Human Rights', on 23 October 2021. Early career scholars, PhD candidates, post-graduate students and under- graduate students are encouraged to submit an abstract (300 words) of their works to lawreview@ifim.edu.in by 25th August 2021. Selected abstracts will  be notified by...

Sponsored Announcement The British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) provides training that combines world leading research with an applied perspective. Our courses are designed to enable legal practitioners, government officials, students, academics, and civil society organisations to gain expert insights and to deepen their knowledge in areas of international law. For autumn 2021, BIICL has expanded its programme of short courses to bring a...

Michael Karnavas is a criminal-defence attorney and former President of the Association of Defence Counsel of the ICTY. He currently represents Paul Gicheru at the ICC. This post first appeared on his personal blog. … man has consciously and unconsciously inflicted irreparable damage to the environment in times of war and peace.   Richard A. Falk, 1973 And will continue to inflict irreparable...

[Arvind Ganesan is business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch.] The United Nations formally recognized a decade ago that businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights. It was a groundbreaking development. 10 years later, it’s clear that it was only a first step: we need laws that enforce companies’ duty to protect workers and communities from abuse and hold them accountable if they...

[Doug Cassel is Emeritus Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School.] The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this month in Nestle USA Inc. v. Doe that “general corporate activity” in the U.S. is not a sufficient domestic basis to warrant Alien Tort Statute (ATS) jurisdiction over claims against a U.S. corporation for alleged human rights violations overseas. The media response generally echoed that of the...

In my previous posts on the crime of ecocide -- Post 1, Post 2 -- I argued the theoretical/normative case against the IEP's decision to subject lawful acts to anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis via the "wantonness" requirement. In this post, I want to bracket the issue of whether the definition of ecocide should distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts and question...

[Dr. Dalia Palombo  is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen.] Imperialism and Transnational Human Rights Litigation How to hold multinationals to account for human rights abuses? This is a question that has tormented scholars, litigators and advocates. It is difficult to answer because the term “multinational” does not exist in law. From the legal perspective, a multinational is a conglomerate of...

[Gabrielle Holly is a Senior Adviser in the Human Rights and Business Department at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and an experienced commercial disputes practitioner. You can find her on twitter at @Gabriellellell.]  In recent years we have seen tremendous momentum behind moves to introduce mandatory human rights due diligence obligations in law, both at the national level and at the international...

[Penelope A. Bergkamp is a graduate from the National University of Singapore and KU Leuven, and law practitioner in Brussels.] Corporate liability and supply chain liability (SCL) in particular are experiencing a rapid and dramatic revolution. Supply chain liability (“SCL”) is the liability of a multinational corporation for damages caused by its business partners, often in developing countries. The term business partners refers to any business partner,...

[Paul Mougeolle is a representative of the association Notre Affaire à Tous, legal researcher for the NGO Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and Ph.D. candidate at University of Paris Nanterre and University of Potsdam.] A wind of change is currently blowing in climate change litigation. Plaintiffs secure pioneering wins before the highest courts of Colombia, the Netherlands, Ireland, France and Germany. On the 26th of May...