INTRODUCTION

Corporations are a key driver of the free market economy in a globalized world. Because of their omnipresent role in today's economy, people have become fully dependent on corporations. They “determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work, and what we do” (Bakan 2004: 5). Corporations – more precisely, the tiny percentage of people heading such corporations – are also the key beneficiary of the current free market economy. To illustrate, over the last ten years “the richest 1% of humanity has captured more than half of all new global wealth. Since 2020, … this wealth grab by the super-rich has accelerated, and the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth” (Oxfam International 2023: 8).

Even when people may seem to be benefiting from globalized free markets, they are, in essence, at the service of corporations. For example, although global supply chains may offer a variety of cheap products and create employment in developing countries, they are also sites of exploitation of workers and outsourcing of environmental pollution to the Global South. In the name of freedom, convenience and flexibility, gig workers have bartered their employee status and all related benefits under labour laws. Similarly, people using free internet are (un)consciously becoming subjects of unconscionable data mining.

In parallel – as well as in response – to the rise in corporate power and wealth, there has been the growth of business and human rights (BHR) as a distinct field, with its own set of standards articulating human rights responsibilities of corporations. The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) have become the posterchild of the BHR field. The UNGPs envisage all business enterprises respecting all internationally recognized human rights. They also prescribe human rights due diligence (HRDD) as the primary tool to “know and show” how corporations respect human rights (UN HRC 2011b). This voluntary responsibility to conduct regular HRDD is increasingly hardening into a legal obligation, primarily as a result of the emergence of mandatory HRDD laws in Europe (European Coalition for Corporate Justice 2022). The most recent addition to this trend is the draft proposal of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), released in February 2022 (European Parliament 2022).