2 - International Pressure for Corporate Accountability

Summary

This chapter examines the obstacles to corporate accountability at the international level: unsettled international law regarding the binding and enforceable human rights obligations of business entities, the absence of international enforcement mechanisms to hold economic actors accountable, and the related lack of international pressure on states to deliver to victims of corporate complicity their rights to truth, justice, remedy, and guarantees of non-repetition.

It looks empirically at when and why international and foreign courts advanced corporate accountability and when they have not. Second, it discusses power and politics obstacles to the development of the key elements of international pressure: international enforcement mechanisms, binding human rights obligations in international law, and international accountability agency. It concludes with the argument that the absence of international pressure has not blocked corporate accountability. Instead, corporate accountability is underway via domestic processes in the Global South.