Protection internationale des droits de l'homme et activités des sociétés transnationalesInternational/Protection of Human Rights and Activities of Transnational Corporations

In 2011, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously adopted the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which is the first global standard for preventing and addressing the risks of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activities.The UNGPs encompass three pillars outlining how states and businesses should implement the framework: 1) The state duty to protect human rights; 2) The corporate responsibility to respect human rights and 3) Access to remedy for victims of business-related abuses. All that has implications both for public international law and for private international law. Private international law analysis, in particular, becomes crucial to explore, as it is done in the second part of the course, the legal meaning of the implementation of the third pillar of the UNGPs, i.e. on access to remedies for victims of violations of human rights committed in the context of business activities. If remedies precede rights, it is regrettable that the third pillar turns out to be the weakest one as compared to the other two. Indeed, it becomes evident that the proliferation of international treaties of protection of human rights, international acts, supervisory bodies, laws, initiatives of CSR or doctrinal studies, risk to remain just different forms of political dialogue if they have no effective legal use for victims on the ground. Further information, including a table of contents and some extracts, is available on the publisher website.