National and Supra-national Institutions in International Business: Exploring the Business and Human Rights Space

The emerging business and human rights field lends itself to studying extraterritoriality in its different facets. The role of the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights (UNGP) are of particular interest in this regard. Not only do they urge home governments to implement adequate regulatory, administrative and judicial mechanisms that incentivize and/or enforce that home companies act with proper care when operating abroad; they also ask such multinationals themselves to use their leverage over foreign suppliers and other institutions to influence their human rights conduct. In other words, multinationals are both addressee/receiver as well as sender of extraterritorial pressures in host countries. In this contribution, I will assess this interdependence between mechanisms, above (particularly UNGP), below (corporate policies; use of UNGP by NGOs) and at the state level (governmental policies; judicial mechanisms with reference to UNGP) in terms of building momentum and significance for measures with extraterritorial effects. I will put a particular emphasis on recent developments in the use of home state human rights litigation against parent companies of deviant subsidiaries abroad. As we have shown in a recent study, such litigation impacts corporations’ human rights conduct in manifold ways despite often failing to provide redress and remedy to victims in the host states.