This article provides an overview of the key features of multinational human rights litigation in the United Kingdom, including the development of a tort-based parent company duty of care, the principles relating to forum non conveniens and applicable law and other key procedural and practical barriers to victims’ access to justice. The article highlights some of the actual and perceived limitations of litigation. It also considers the concurrent development of and mutually reinforcing relationship between MNC tort litigation and the field of Business & Human Rights.

As the climate and biodiversity crises gain unprecedented attention, many governments across the global north are taking legislative steps to address deforestation in supply chains linked to their domestic consumption or commercial activities, among them, the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU).1

The business and human rights debate has essentially bypassed the media industry. This article addresses that gap in the debate by applying the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to the media. Application of human rights responsibilities to the media in accordance with the Guiding Principles is significantly complicated by the existence of media rights of freedom of expression. It is argued that the application of the Guiding Principles to the media industry leaves significant scope for it to be involved with serious and systemic human rights violations. This conclusion indicates that the Guiding Principles are an inadequately theorised tool for dealing with human rights responsibilities of the media. It may reveal deeper flaws in the Guiding Principles, which extend to industries other than the media. At the least, a dialogue between the human rights community and the media industry must commence in order to work out how human rights might apply in the context of the responsibilities of one of the world’s most important and powerful industries.

In a series of previous articles I have defended the claim that there are robust, theoretical justifications for concluding that corporations have human rights obligations and that those obligations are distinct from the larger set of human rights obligations that are properly attributed to states. Hsieh claims that corporations do not have human rights obligations. In this reply it is argued that even if one takes what Hsieh refers to as an ‘institutional approach’ to understanding the human rights obligations of states, corporations are nonetheless properly understood to have human rights obligations regarding those with whom they interact, such as workers, customers and community members.

The ‘Going Out’ strategy that China began in 1999 escalated to a global level with the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in 2013. However, the lack of a clear international framework for corporate accountability accentuates the risks of human rights’ affectation by Chinese corporations, considering their controversial performance in Latin America. This article engages with the scholarly framework of international norm localization to analyze the enactment of Chinese business and human rights standards and their concrete application. This assessment relies on an extensive review of academic and policy research and the analysis of social conflicts around one of the largest copper mines in the region, Las Bambas, located in the highlands of Peru. The case shows that the main problem is not the lack of incorporation of business and human rights standards into national laws and the guidelines of companies’ home regulators, but the different ways they are interpreted by social actors on the ground. Local communities are not passive receptors of those norms but norm makers who appropriate them and provide new meanings in line with their self-determination. Chinese and national authorities and firms, therefore, need to engage with those norms from the perspective of local people.

This piece analyses the recent judgment from the Makhanda High Court in Sustaining the Wild Coast NPC v Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy setting aside the decision to grant Shell and Impact Africa an exploratory right. Shell and Impact Africa intended to conduct a seismic survey along South Africa’s Wild Coast. Such a survey stood to have a substantial impact on the rights and interests of several local communities residing along the coastline. Because Shell, Impact Africa and the Director-General of the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy failed to consider these rights and interests, the court decided to overturn the decision granting the companies their exploratory right. To this end, the judgment provides a powerful vindication of the rights of local communities, illustrating what is possible when regulatory schemes are applied purposively and not as a mere box-ticking exercise.

As has now been well publicized, there is serious and credible evidence that Uyghur and other minority communities in China are being forced into internment or ‘re-education’ camps,1 with strong links to subsequent forced labour in factories, particularly centred in Xinjiang province.2 The use of forced labour (intimately connected to many international supply chains) as a hallmark feature of the Chinese state’s oppression of its Uyghur peoples requires a ‘business and human rights’ (BHR) lens to responses to the human rights violations in the region.

Many of those who dare to raise their voices in defence of human rights in response to abuses committed in connection to mega-projects are being repressed in the Americas. In this context, Indigenous women leaders face multiple forms of violence, including gender-based violence. The prevailing narrative of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ that accompanies mega-projects in the region often stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences, as Indigenous women human rights defenders frequently face silencing practices from companies, authorities and other groups including paramilitary forces. In this article, I contend that Indigenous women leaders have managed to overcome the silence that is being imposed on them. But what are silencing practices? What does gender-based violence mean in this context? How do Indigenous women leaders overcome silencing practices? The article responds to these questions by focusing on the Wayúu Women’s Force mobilization in Colombia and drawing on the emerging ‘braided action’ theoretical framework.

This article explores some aspects of the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision on Nevsun Resources v Araya in the light of its exposition on the act of state doctrine and application of core human rights as an integral aspect of international customary law and common law. It examines the Nevsun decision in the context of recent statutory developments in France and the Netherlands, the promised law reform in the European Union, and the proposed business and human rights treaty. I argue that it is high time to abandon the doctrinal fossil that human rights obligations do not apply to corporate governance and operations. It is hoped that COVID-19 contexts, and a post-pandemic world, will expeditiously result in the willing adoption of a treaty on business and human rights.

The scale and scope of the climate crisis and its drastically worsening impacts means that even as a ‘climate due diligence’ obligation is increasingly taking shape as a dimension of human rights due diligence, there is also growing evidence of the limitations of this emerging norm. This article provides four critiques of climate due diligence based on its insufficiency, its conceptual ambiguity, its operational limitations, and its structural limitations. It argues that these critiques could be addressed by regulatory reform that draw clear ‘red lines’ based on the need to prevent the development of any new fossil fuel and address the ‘corporate capture’ of regulatory institutions by the fossil fuel industry. Additionally, it calls for reparations to ensure effective access to a remedy for existing and potential future climate-related human rights impacts that business has caused or contributed to.