The Linkages Between Business and Human Rights and Their Underlying Root Causes

Scholarly and activist debate in the business and human rights conversation has largely centered on the conduct of corporations. This article suggests that we look deeper at the structural, underlying causes and commence remedial action from there. More specifically, corporations make use of the politico-economic space available to them from the extensive international law of foreign investment and international trade regimes. These laws are meant to favor corporations over and above the ordinary regulatory competence of (mostly) developing states, which in turn gives rise to a lax regulatory environment. This is further exacerbated by poor extra-territorial regulation in home/mother states, in addition to the outdated notion that corporations only possess soft law human rights obligations, supposedly because of their limited international legal personality. This article argues that it is the global financial/investment architecture that effectively pushes corporations to take advantage of poor governance, which in turn necessitates stronger domestic (human rights and developmental based) regulation in parallel with adequate standards of investment and trade protection.