Foreign direct liability litigation against businesses is still a growing trend in European domestic courts, going on for over two decades.1 With absent effective remedies in host states, victims of human rights abuses committed by transnational corporations’ subsidiaries try to get access to remedy in the courts of the home states of the parent companies. A crucial factor for whether such cases can succeed, is the viability of the claims against the parent companies allegedly involved in the abuses. The principal legal route that victims have used to hold parent companies liable is through common law negligence claims.

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) has become the buzzword of much of the advocacy and work today around business and human rights.1 It is almost commonplace that companies have the responsibility to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address these adverse human rights impacts as part of their ongoing HRDD processes, in line with the UNGPs.2 The assessment of human rights impacts (HRIA) is a critical step in this process.3

This article is motivated by certain issues for which, in current Business and Human Rights (BHR) discourse, largely framed in terms of the Ruggie reports, no satisfactory solutions have been found to date. These quandaries refer to (a) foundational matters: the link between human rights law and ethics; (b) normative force: the obligatoriness of human rights claims on corporations; and (c) scope and content of human rights claims on corporations. Turning to the virtue ethics and natural law (VENL) tradition, we encounter the following possible responses: (a) positive laws, such as those concerning human rights, ultimately require a basis in natural law; (b) although the public use of the coercive force of law belongs to the state alone, its private use by non-state actors such as individuals and corporations may be legitimate in some cases; and (c) practical wisdom is necessary in the proper interpretation and implementation of human rights claims on corporations, taking into account relevant contingencies. The blending of BHR discourse with the VENL tradition is best captured in modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Although historically CST has adopted the VENL language, engagement with social issues in the modern world has enabled it to reach an understanding with rights theory as well, particularly in connection with business and the economy.

Salinas Grandes is a vast salt flat in the high-altitude Puna region of Salta and Jujuy, two north-western provinces of Argentina. It is situated in one of the world’s driest regions, with an extremely fragile ecosystem. Salinas Grandes is so iconic and beautiful that Argentinians voted it amongst the country’s top seven natural wonders in May 2019.1 In addition to its beauty, this stunning desert of salt also holds one of the largest reserves of lithium in the world. Lithium is a light and versatile metal used to produce, among other things, the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles (EV). As global efforts to phase out fossil fuels from our transport systems and adopt clean energy alternatives increase, lithium is becoming increasingly critical. It is no wonder, therefore, that industry has coined it the ‘white gold’.2 Salinas Grandes is only one of many salt lakes in North West Argentina which, together with Bolivia and Chile, form what is known as the ‘lithium triangle’. It is estimated that these three countries alone account for more than half of the world’s lithium.3 Global demand for lithium to produce EV is expected to grow rapidly over the coming decade. To meet this demand, the lithium industry will require significant investment to ramp up additional supply.4 As a result, all eyes have turned to the ‘lithium triangle’ and investment in the region has soared in recent years.5 For the three developing countries, this represents a unique opportunity to attract much-needed foreign investment and boost economic growth.6

To explore the emerging and contested issue of business and human rights in the area of climate change, this article provides a critical discussion from the viewpoint of moral philosophy. A novel typology of businesses’ human rights duties (‘duty’ is considered synonymous with ‘responsibility’ here) is proposed. It claims that duties are both forward- and backward-looking. Cases of human rights litigation seeking remedy for climate-related harms are backward-looking, and duties should be determined on the basis of proportion of historical emissions, culpable knowledge and counter-acts to abate climate harms. Businesses’ forward-looking duties, however, depend on their power, privilege, interest and collective abilities. The typology is then assessed against the background of recent legal principles and instruments. It is concluded that moral duties of business reach beyond mere respect for human rights and national jurisdictions in the context of climate change.

This article argues that the trend to zoom into mandatory human rights due diligence (mHRDD) as the sole solution to corporate abuse is misleading. In fact, it might risk missing entirely the main point which, as set out in this article, should be creating economic systems that enable rights-based and rights-driven business models. A small, but growing number of scholarly articles address the economic, fiscal and regulatory institutions needed to create an enabling environment for the fulfilment of human rights. These policy areas constitute what some of us understand as a ‘rights-based economy’ or ‘rights-enabling economies’. State-level efforts would be much more effective in promoting substantive equality if driven by a rights-based approach rather than a market logic. This article contends that while ensuring comprehensive mHRDD is in place as a preventative and mitigation tool, states must also push for transformative macroeconomic policies based on human rights principles as a way to fundamentally change business models.

Inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the international development community is driving digital ID programmes in low and middle income countries (LMICs) such as Kenya. Kenya has had experience with state-issued identity registration such as that proposed in digital ID programmes for over a century. Identity registration has gendered impacts, stemming from the historical exclusion of women in the system, lack of recognition of their contribution to new uses of the system, as well as lack of engagement with women regarding remedies. Digital ID risks continuing and exacerbating these injustices, as it is based on the existing system. This article uses the ‘protect, respect, remedy’ framework of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to analyse how decolonial approaches could be applied in digital ID to untangle it from colonial legacies, check the ever-increasing power of businesses involved in digital ID systems, and broaden intersectional understanding of human rights.

The decade of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) coincides with India’s National Voluntary Guidelines on businesses’ social, environmental, and economic responsibilities (NVGs) and the National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBC) – an updated version of the NVGs. Human rights are one of the core principles in both guidelines and they draw upon the ‘Protect–Respect–Remedy’ framework of the UNGPs. The NVGs and NGRBC go beyond the UNGPs by requiring organizations not only to respect human rights, but also to promote them in their spheres of influence. Several factors, however, derailed the implementation of this progressive policy shift. This article explores the challenges in implementation and calls for the multiple actors involved to work together and shape a collaborative action plan for effective implementation of the NGRBC in the next decade. The authors reiterate the need for alternative lenses to frame the responsible business agenda within developing countries through positive obligations.

Businesses have increasingly recognized their responsibility to respect human rights in their operations. This has been in part guided by international initiatives, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, as well as guidance and regulations from states. Although these measures recognize risks associated with conflict-affected areas, contexts of occupation present unique concerns. These issues become even more complex when states send mixed messages to businesses. This is most evident when examining the discourse on and regulation of business operations linked to Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory, especially those with operations and relationships related to ‘security’. This article seeks to highlight the frequent disregard of human rights responsibilities and obligations by states and businesses related to the occupied Palestinian territory and population, which has created a gap in accountability that civil society has attempted to address.

Across the United States (US), farmworkers and their allies are mobilizing to encourage companies to join a Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) program. On May Day, hundreds marched in support of Migrant Justice’s campaign to convince the Hannaford supermarket chain to join the Milk With Dignity program, a WSR program focused on working conditions in the dairy industry.1 At the most recent annual shareholder meeting of Wendy’s, a US-based fast food franchise, several members of the board of directors faced opposition to renewal of their positions in response to what some shareholders perceived as Wendy’s inadequate disclosure on its efforts to protect workers in its supply chain.2 The opposition forms part of a years-long campaign by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its allies to convince Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program, the inaugural WSR program.3

In the waning days of the indelible 2020, China and the European Union (EU) clinched an ‘in-principle’ deal on their Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI).1 After seven years of negotiation, the treaty attracted widespread public scrutiny, partly due to the significant investment flows between China and the EU, although wider considerations are also at play. China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization laid a major building block in the global order. Its economic rise and export growth have provided cheaper electronics, appliances and clothes for global consumers, but also prompted concerns about the environment and implications for jobs and working conditions in deindustrializing countries. This economic reconfiguration has created complex, often tense, relations between China and established powers such as the EU and the United States (US), to which multilateral arrangements have offered only partial responses.2

From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology companies have participated in the search for solutions to new challenges. One of these has been the need for public health authorities to engage in contact-tracing to help curb the spread of the disease. Manual contact-tracing for public health purposes is a well-established component of the management of epidemics and pandemics. Public health authorities identify infected individuals, question them about close contacts, and then reach out to those contacts with the appropriate public health advice. From the outset of the pandemic, many believed that technology could play a role in supplementing manual contact-tracing. How it could do so quickly became tied to issues of how it should do so, engendering a normative discussion affecting the partnership between business and government in the large-scale design and deployment of technology for public health surveillance.