This chapter introduces ideas and controversies in international law scholarship on business and human rights. Furthermore, it determines the legal limitations for the EU and its Member States when regulating and remedying rights violations committed by corporations from emerging and developing states. To begin, domestic measures with extraterritorial implications are discussed. Import-restrictive measures also appear an attractive solution for states that are increasingly expected (or obliged) to rein in ‘their’ corporate nationals when they violate rights in third states. Such measures allow states to create an artificial level playing field that enforces the same standards across all corporations that operate in its market. Linking rights to trade concessions is, however, contested. The International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization regimes are discussed. Finally, it is explained that each state has acted unilaterally in developing the rules governing the use of civil adjudicative jurisdiction. Support for local remedies by the extraterritorial state does not distinguish between local and foreign corporations. A cost-benefit critique of extraterritorial remediation over foreign corporations is also presented.

After several years of negotiations, twelve Pacific Rim countries signed, in February 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is one of the highest profile Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) of the last decade. After US withdrawal in January 2017, a revised “Comprehensive and Progressive TPP” was signed by the other eleven negotiating Parties in March 2018. The CPTPP makes no modifications to the original Chapter 2 so the chapter remains in its entirety applicable to relations among the Parties. References in the chapter are to the original TPP unless context requires otherwise. Annex 2-D of the TPP is comprised of hundreds of pages of carefully negotiated tariff commitments that are accompanied by many chapters that seek to regulate measures such as trade remedies, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, competition policy, state-owned enterprises and electronic commerce. Together, these provisions were part of a complex framework that sought to ensure that the agreed tariff elimination would not be undermined or nullified by other measures. However, the TPP was designed to be more than just a traditional trade deal.