On the Responsibility to Protect and the Business and Human Rights Agenda

Summary

INTRODUCTION

International law recognises the responsibility or duty of states to protect their populations from grave human rights abuses amounting to international crimes. Since 2001, there has been a specific focus on the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing, following the development of the doctrine on the responsibility to protect (R2P). However, in meeting that responsibility, states must necessarily take into consideration the development of due diligence standards, elaborated mainly under international human rights law, but also in prominent judgments by the International Court of Justice, such as the Corfu Channel or Bosnian Genocide judgments.

From a different perspective, corporations have oft en been accused of aiding and abetting repressive regimes in the commission of crimes against humanity and other egregious violations of international law. Recent developments in the field of business and human rights have suggested that corporations also have a responsibility to respect human rights, particularly through the adoption of corporate policies and due diligence standards which can identify, prevent, mitigate and redress the company's negative impacts on human rights. Additionally, state duties have also been elaborated to include the protection of human rights from the activities of non-state actors, including corporations. These notions have been developed in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a soft law instrument endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council that sets forth a state duty to protect human rights, a corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and emphasises the need to ensure that victims have effective access to judicial and non-judicial remedies. These Guiding Principles have been the catalyst for an international alignment of norms revolving around its three pillars and, despite their non-binding character, they have become a common platform upon which more precise developments have begun to be built.

In light of these developments, the main question that will be discussed in this chapter is whether the R2P doctrine and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are compatible and, if so, how the different standards underlying them complement each other. These issues are explored in the second and third parts of this chapter respectively.