The article deals with the question of whether and why corporations are human rights subjects by analysing the different approaches of regional economic courts and regional human rights courts. For some of these courts, protecting corporate human rights is the natural response to the key role...

Do corporations have human rights? This article addresses a to date rather understudied issue of the corporations and human rights debate: whether and to what extent corporations can be bearers of human rights, with a focus on the ECHR and ECtHR jurisprudence. In a nutshell, it argues that what...

The contemporary human rights debate is mostly concerned with the protection of people affected by change that is beyond their control. But what about those who make use of their basic economic rights to facilitate economic and social change? Do these agents of change need protection and, if so,...

In recent years, a number of international and cross-sectoral initiatives have attempted to respond to the human rights impacts of corporations. Foremost among these is the United Nations’ 2008 “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework and its Guiding Principles on Business and Human...

The standard account of corporate human rights accountability assumes that corporate entities, rather than individual corporate officers or employees, are the optimal targets of regulatory litigation. This assumption has led human rights advocates to despair over recent court decisions that make...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a fixture on the agendas of corporate boards in much the same way as environmental issues did a decade or so ago. To what extent social responsibilities should be made legally enforceable remains a matter of some fierce debate. There are already...

This essay attempts to construct a normative justification for the imposition of human rights duties on transnational corporations (TNCs) that commit environmental wrongs in the developing world. Under the now near-hegemonic worldview of welfare economics, TNCs are analogised to individuals...

Societal constitutionalism presents us with alternatives to state-centered constitutional theory. But this alternative does not so much displace as extend conventional constitutional theory as a set of static premises that structure the organization of legitimate governance units. Constitutional...

The article assesses the phenomenon of “de-humanization” of human rights with respect to two highly contrasting examples: “corporate human rights” and the “Rights of Nature” movement. It analyses the approaches regional human rights courts and regional courts of economic integration...

International human rights law is generally thought to apply directly to states, not to corporations since the latter is not a subject of international law. Some domestic courts are, however, enforcing these norms against corporations in domestic settings. Canadian courts have, for instance,...