Balancing Soft and Hard Law for Business and Human Rights

Choudhury, Barnali

doi:10.1017/s0020589318000155

Cited by 28 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Where legal regimes have been ineffective, non-binding ‘soft’ laws can fill the gap left by ‘hard’ binding legislation. Although non-binding in nature, soft laws can contain elements that foster compliance, and are especially suited to address issues that lack consensus or for which governments are wary of making legally binding commitments [96]. They thus represent an intriguing avenue to promote objectives that have not gained universal and binding support.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of human rights in implementing socially responsible seafood

et al. 2019

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Sustainability standards for seafood mainly address environmental performance criteria and are less concerned with the welfare of fisheries workers who produce the seafood. Yet human rights violations such as slavery and human trafficking are widespread in fisheries around the world, and underscore the need for certification bodies and other seafood supply chain actors to improve social performance, in addition to addressing environmental challenges. Calls for socially responsible seafood have referenced human rights law and policy frameworks to shape the guiding principles of socially responsible seafood and to provide the legal machinery to implement these aspirations, but practical guidance on how to achieve this is lacking. To provide clarity on this challenge, we reviewed the literature concerning human rights in the seafood supply chain, and prepared an analysis of opportunities and challenges to implement socially responsible seafood through relevant human rights, legal and policy instruments. We observe that human rights laws are generally framed in favour of addressing violations of civil and political rights, but there remains considerable scope for applying economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights in this context. Other challenges include weakly defined ESC rights infringements, a lack of straightforward mechanisms to enforce human rights entitlements, and practical difficulties such as resources to support and secure rights. On the positive side, governments can draw on international instruments to inspire national policies and legislation to eliminate illegalities from the seafood supply chain. However, for socially responsible seafood principles to translate into tangible actions, these objectives must be rooted in clear legal obligations and be supported by sufficient national capacity and political will.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of human rights in implementing socially responsible seafood

et al. 2019

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“…43 Even though no extensive hard international regulatory infrastructure has emerged, the mix of various transnational initiatives, including the rise of standards and influential soft law instruments such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs) 44 and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, 45 has certainly approximated and coordinated international responses to recurrent labour, environmental and human rights violations related to global production. 46 This holds also for many national laws whose intent and regulatory strategies often coincide with enhanced human rights protection by, for instance, requiring human rights due diligence from companies. 47 Such policy diffusion notwithstanding, the recent proliferation of hard transnational sustainability laws suggests that regulatory focus has, in many places, started to shift from private standards and the international level towards national law.…”

Section: Regulating Global Value Chain Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational sustainability laws and the regulation of global value chains: comparison and a framework for analysis

Salminen

Rajavuori

2019

Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law

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Several corporate disclosure and due diligence laws related to the social and environmental impacts of globalized production have been enacted across the world over the last decade. While the emergence, operation and impact of such ‘transnational sustainability laws’ have already been extensively analysed, their legal operability remains poorly understood. This a significant omission because transnational sustainability laws form a novel and increasingly important attempt to conceptualize and govern the new logic of global production networks—global value chains—and their regulatory infrastructure. Against this backdrop, this article deploys a comparison of eleven recent transnational sustainability laws and develops an analytical framework to probe legally-operative conceptualizations of global value chains. By analysing how transnational sustainability laws conceptualize the value chain, the lead firm and adequate value chain governance, we argue, these instruments emerge as proxies for a legally-operative framework that better delineates the emerging law of global value chains. Thus, our analysis contributes to growing literature on the potential and limits of transnational sustainability laws as well as to the development of nascent ‘global value chain law’.

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“…The success of such a treaty is questionable due to the potential opposition by the home states of multinational enterprises. It may be noted that although some bilateral investment treaties impose an obligation on investors to have regard to human rights and these obligations may also be subject to investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms, 15 they are limited to a bilateral solution (or regional in the case of regional investment agreements) that is far from being comprehensive, and the obligations remain specific to the context of cross-border investments. 16 What was achieved at an international level has been the adoption of a number of soft law instruments to influence corporate behaviour.…”

Section: Business and Human Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multilevel hardening in progress – Transition from soft towards hard regulation of CSR in the EU

Szabados

2020

Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law

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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is gradually undergoing multilevel transformation in the European Union (EU). Hardening of the initially voluntary CSR approach of the EU is progressively taking place in an interaction between the law of the Member States and EU law. Domestic solutions can serve as a model for EU legislation. In this progress, the Non-Financial Reporting Directive, granting considerable flexibility both to companies and the Member States, can indeed be seen as an intermediate stage and it is expected that, under the impact of human rights due diligence requirements recently imposed on companies by Member States, more substantive obligations will also be introduced at an EU level in the future.

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Balancing Soft and Hard Law for Business and Human Rights

Cited by 28 publications

References 29 publications

The role of human rights in implementing socially responsible seafood

The role of human rights in implementing socially responsible seafood

Transnational sustainability laws and the regulation of global value chains: comparison and a framework for analysis

Multilevel hardening in progress – Transition from soft towards hard regulation of CSR in the EU

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