Business and Human Rights
Etablissement : Faculté de Droit – Lille et Issy-les-Moulineaux
Langue : Anglais
Formation(s) dans laquelle/lesquelles le cours apparait :
Période : S1
- Knowledge of the international human rights legal framework, as well as international criminal law, international investment law and international trade law are helpful but not necessary to follow the course.
- Familiarity with foreign legal systems, particularly common law systems is also an asset but is not required.
At the end of the course, the student should be able to:
1. Demonstrate comprehensive knowledge and systematic understanding of international and selected domestic standards on business and human rights, and how they relate to other areas of law;
2. Engage with and discuss key business and human rights cases before domestic courts and non-judicial accountability mechanisms;
3. Identify remaining gaps in the field of business and human rights and contribute to discussions on how these could be bridged.
4. Resource key relevant issues using library, legal journals, Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) reports as well as the United Nations documents portal, and provide cross-cutting thematic analysis of legal sources in the field of business and human rights;
5. Evaluate the application of business and human rights standards by states and corporations in specific contexts;
6. Engage critically with the legal scholarship on business and human rights.
The question of how to make transnational corporations accountable for human rights, labour and environmental rights violations has been gaining in importance. Citizens around the world are becoming increasingly aware of global interconnections and supply chains that link production and consumption, and how transnational corporations are complicit in a “race to the bottom” when in comes to the protection of workers, activists, and the environment. Moreover, when tragedy strikes, like in the case of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, it is often almost impossible to hold anybody accountable. It would seem, therefore, that abuses are structural, even as the operations of transnational corporations are an essential component of our contemporary global economy.
What this situation shows us is that certain non-state actors, in particular transnational corporations (TNCs), manage to game the international system to their benefit, even when this causes harm and damage. That they can do this has everything to do with (international) law. How is international law complicit in this situation? How can it offer solutions? Which other (legal) developments promise to make a significant difference? This course will first focus on the phenomenon of transnational corporations as a phenomenon not just of national law, but of international law. As we will see in a quick historical review, corporations are as old as the modern state itself. As part of this exploration, the course will develop a clearer picture of the role that businesses in general, and TNCs in particular, play in our global political economy. We will then focus on the various ways in which international law has helped corporations to avoid accountability and even justice. This will lay the ground for an examination of how international lawyers, human rights lawyers, and others have pursued various strategies to address this issue, albeit with varying success. In particular, we will study the various normative projects that have taken place at the UN, the OECD, and other international and regional organizations. In the last part of this course, we will examine how the growing set of human rights, labour and environmental standards are being embedded in national and transnational legal mechanisms. In particular, recent European and EU legislation points towards a future in which human rights may finally become effective.
Session 1: What do we talk about when we talk about when we talk about business and human rights?
Session 2: TNCs in international law
Session 3: TNCs in the global political economy
Session 4: A history of legal strategies to hold business accountable – taking stock
Session 5: Developing standards: the UN
Session 6: Developing standards: the OECD
Session 7: Is an international treaty the answer?
Session 8: Changing the game: mandatory due diligence
Session 9: Examining the distributional consequences of mandatory due diligence
Session 10: Risk analysis as the future of human rights
Session 11: Reforming corporate law. Toward stakeholder capitalism?
Session 12: Taking stock – business and human rights in a changing world
