Beyond the Western ‘Business and Human Rights’ Tunnel Vision
Aleydis Nissen is a postdoc researcher at Leiden Law School, FWO (grant 74910) and F.R.S.-FNRS (grant FC 38129). She completed her PhD studies at Cardiff University in February 2020.
Human rights violations by corporations that operate in more than one country have attracted the attention of legal scholars from the global North and the global South over the past five decades. However, they have almost exclusively focused on corporations from economically developed countries. Corporations of other countries have been largely overlooked. With reference to my PhD thesis, this article attempts to narrow this research gap by studying such corporations in their own right and as competitors of EU-based corporations. This article also proposes a research agenda with linked but different issues.
Les violations des droits de l’homme commises par des entreprises opérant dans plusieurs pays ont attiré l’attention des juristes du Nord et du Sud au cours des cinq dernières décennies. Cependant, ils se sont presque exclusivement concentrés sur les entreprises des pays économiquement développés. Les sociétés d’autres pays ont été largement négligées. En se référant à ma thèse de doctorat, cet article tente de combler cette lacune en étudiant ces entreprises en tant que telles et en tant que concurrentes des entreprises européennes. Cet article propose également un programme de recherche sur des questions liées mais différentes.
*This article is based on the author’s Thesis (forthcoming) “Business and Human Rights: The Role of EU Member States in Developing Accountability Mechanisms for Corporations from Developing and Emerging States”, which was awarded the Thesis Prize 2020 of the European Group of Public Law (EGPL). The author would like to thank Katerina Papanikolaou and the anonymous reviewers of this article.
