This chapter introduces ideas and controversies in international law scholarship on business and human rights. Furthermore, it determines the legal limitations for the EU and its Member States when regulating and remedying rights violations committed by corporations from emerging and developing states. To begin, domestic measures with extraterritorial implications are discussed. Import-restrictive measures also appear an attractive solution for states that are increasingly expected (or obliged) to rein in ‘their’ corporate nationals when they violate rights in third states. Such measures allow states to create an artificial level playing field that enforces the same standards across all corporations that operate in its market. Linking rights to trade concessions is, however, contested. The International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization regimes are discussed. Finally, it is explained that each state has acted unilaterally in developing the rules governing the use of civil adjudicative jurisdiction. Support for local remedies by the extraterritorial state does not distinguish between local and foreign corporations. A cost-benefit critique of extraterritorial remediation over foreign corporations is also presented.

Automated driving systems (ADSs) are growing exponentially as one of the most promising AI applications. ADSs promise to transform ways in which people commute and connect with one another, altering the conventional division of labor, social interactions, and provision of services. Regulatory issues such as testing and safety, cybersecurity, connectivity, liability, and insurance are driving governments to establish comprehensive and consistent policy frameworks. Of key importance is ADSs’ ethical challenges. How to align ADS development with fundamental ethical principles embedded in a society remains a difficult question. The “Trolley Problem” aptly demonstrates such tension. While it seems essential to have rules and standards reflecting local values and contexts, potential conflicts and duplication may have serious trade implications in terms of how ADS is designed, manufactured, distributed, serviced, and driven across borders. This chapter examines the multifaceted, complex regulatory issues related to ADS and uses the most controversial, ethical dimension to analyze the tensions between the protection of public morals and trade secrets under the WTO. It unpacks three levels of challenges that may translate into a regulatory dilemma in light of WTO members’ rights and obligations under GATT, TBT Agreement, and the TRIPS Agreement and identifies possible venues of reconfiguration.

In this chapter, it is argued that the deficiencies of the international human rights regime pose a difficult dilemma for individual states – when and how to respond to egregious human rights violations abroad. Being constrained by a few possible alternatives, individual states or groups of states increasingly rely upon coercive economic measures (unilateral economic sanctions) to remedy grave human rights violations. The legality of unilateral economic sanctions has been debated at length within the international community. Notwithstanding this, their consistency with public international law and more specifically, WTO law is still contestable. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses the theoretical framework of the doctrine of Common Concern and its potential to discipline the use of coercive economic measures imposed on human rights grounds. It explores the ability of the emerging doctrine to provide a new legal framework and necessary thresholds to legitimize coercive economic measures as well as to restrict their use if they are politically motivated.

Wojciech Sadurski considers how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), an emerging European constitutional court for human rights, has engaged in a public reason compatible scrutiny of legislative aims pursued by national laws interfering with the proclaimed rights. Sadurski concludes that the Court has almost always eschewed its authority to evaluate the aims of state laws or decisions in this way. On the very few occasions when it did express its doubts about the plausibility of the aims cited by the governments concerned, the Court either refused to attach any weight to these doubts and moved on to the next stage in the analysis (the necessity scrutiny). The main burden of the aim scrutiny was therefore shifted to the necessity stage, when the Court assessed whether the restrictions were necessary (in a democratic society) to attain this aim. Sadurski offers an explanation for this puzzling (as he claims) argumentative maneuver. Challenging the state at stage of aim ascertainment brings the Court into a head-on collision course with the state and risks weakening the Court’s legitimacy, which is tenuous at the best of times anyway.