Academic defenders of sweatshops argue that disregarding labour rights will result in increased welfare in the developing nations where transnational corporations (TNCs) operate. They argue that TNCs should ignore local labour laws in the best interests of the poor. In this article we criticise this ‘ignore the law’ position regarding sweatshops on three separate grounds. First, it fails to acknowledge the demands for businesses to respect the rule of law as part of the development process. Second, it utilises an inadequate account of voluntary contractual bargaining which overlooks how employment practises operate in sectors prone to utilising sweatshop labour, leading to coercive employment conditions incompatible with human dignity and free choice. Third, it fails to adequately account for labour law and international labour standards, which embody a strong moral conception of dignity at work and observance of fundamental human rights in protecting workers against abuse through the resulting legal duties placed on states and corporate actors. We conclude that poverty reduction requires the support of both private and public actors. Advocating the side-stepping of labour laws distracts from the important work of institution building necessary to protect workers and facilitate economic growth consistent with decent work, sustainable development, fairness and human dignity as embodied in international labour standards.

This Special Issue denotes the first comprehensive attempt to place business and human rights-related (BHR) developments in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region on the map of global discussions in BHR. The CEE is a geographical area that is historically, politically, socio-economically, geo-strategically and culturally distinct from other regions, including Western Europe. Hence, this Special Issue explores the region’s specific elements and factors and how they affect and influence the implementation and embedding of human rights in the practice of business enterprises in the region. The ‘Scholarly Articles’ and ‘Developments in the Field’ pieces collected in this issue highlight the promising and not-so-promising developments and practices of state institutions, business enterprises, and other actors. It documents the current situation in the region and outlines ideas and prospects for addressing the identified challenges over the next decade. As an introduction to the Special Issue, this editorial outlines the region’s leading trends and prospects in BHR. It reflects on persisting challenges and notes the region’s progress in BHR awareness, knowledge and capacity in recent decades.

Algorithmic human resource management (AHRM), the automation or augmentation of human resources-related decision-making with the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled algorithms, can increase recruitment efficiency but also lead to discriminatory results and systematic disadvantages for marginalized groups in society. In this paper, we address the issue of equal treatment of workers and their fundamental rights when dealing with these AI recruitment systems. We analyse how and to what extent algorithmic biases can manifest and investigate how they affect workers’ fundamental rights, specifically (1) the right to equality, equity, and non-discrimination; (2) the right to privacy; and, finally, (3) the right to work. We recommend crucial ethical safeguards to support these fundamental rights and advance forms of responsible AI governance in HR-related decisions and activities.

This paper analyses five constitutional developments in Central and Eastern Europe that can impact the domestic implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Using Czechia, Poland and Slovenia as examples, the paper highlights four potential drivers, namely: (1) the process of constitutionalizing human rights; (2) the proliferation of the doctrine of horizontal effect of constitutional rights; (3) the constitutional legitimacy of state intervention in the free market economy; and (4) the mechanism of judicial review. Furthermore, the author underlines the most significant challenge, which is increasing resistance to international norms in some countries, e.g., Poland. The paper concludes that the jurisprudence of the constitutional courts can facilitate the domestic implementation of the UNGPs, particularly Pillars I (State duty to protect human rights) and III (access to remedy).

In this paper, I argue that there is an inconsistency between the content of some of the labour-related human rights articulated in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the obligations ascribed to various actors regarding those rights in the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), in particular those ascribed to corporations. Recognizing the inconsistency, I claim, can help us see some of the moral limitations of both familiar public responses to exploitative labour practices and influential philosophical accounts of the wrong of exploitation. In light of these limitations, I argue that there are reasons to accept a more expansive account of the human rights-related obligations of corporations than that found in the UNGPs, and in particular that we should accept that corporations have obligations to actively contribute to lifting people out of poverty.

The business and human rights (BHR) framework has regularly been considered the superior legal regime of corporate accountability for business-related human rights abuses, which must be both protected from and incorporated into investment treaties. However, investment treaties have surpassed the BHR framework in an important respect: certain investment treaties impose strict international legal obligations, including human rights-related obligations, directly on investors, thereby going beyond the normatively ambiguous corporate responsibility to respect. Investment treaty reform initiatives, including those seeking to align investment treaties with the BHR agenda, should, therefore, take care to avoid inadvertently undoing this advance towards investors’ legal accountability.

This article utilizes a ‘rituals-ritualism’ framework to assess the perils and potentials of relying upon mandatory human rights due diligence (mHRDD) laws to regulate the behaviour of transnational corporations (TNCs). This framework offers a socio-legal perspective that seeks to show how law is both influenced by and influences the social context within which it operates, i.e., the socially embedded operation of law.1 It has been advanced as a useful rubric for assessing whether and how states comply with human rights treaties,2 but can be extended to an assessment of mHRDD laws. Ultimately, this article hypothesizes that the potential regulatory effectiveness of mHRDD laws hinges on the extent to which HRDD obligations are transformed into rituals akin to cultural norms. In the absence of such a transformation, ritualism in HRDD will only further entrench a problematic status quo that has allowed TNCs to externalize the human rights and environmental impacts of their activities.

The quest for corporate accountability remains unabated in the business and human rights (BHR) field. This paper examines the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) and Business Interest Associations (BIA) as entrepreneurs, antipreneurs and saboteurs in setting human rights standards. Through this conceptualization, this paper argues that corporate accountability remains elusive because of corporate actors’ normative power and influence in the BHR norm contestation. It attributes corporate actors’ influence in the norm contestation to the UN multistakeholder design that sees nonstate actors as partners and stakeholders in setting global human rights standards. This article then argues that to force a norm change in the BHR field, there is a need to rethink the BHR governance model. Corporate actors must be reconceptualized as ‘regulated individuals’ during norm discussions and standard-setting processes.

Following the first-ever rule of law conditionality procedure in September 2022, a resolution was adopted by the European Parliament which declared that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, as it had turned into a ‘hybrid regime of electoral autocracy’. Against this background, this article explains the business and human rights (BHR) gap in Hungary and presents its consequences for the Ukrainian refugee crisis. We first provide a general overview of the role of business in the development and consolidation of the Orbán regime over the past 13 years, highlighting how businesses are both agents and victims of legal and political developments. The paper distinguishes four types of ‘business’: multinational and foreign companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; local companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; multinational companies that are targets of restrictive and repressive populist rhetoric and economic policies; and the ‘rest’, the remainder that try to avoid becoming targets of oligarchic takeovers. The article also documents how the state and other stakeholders are failing to meet their commitments under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The next part of the article assesses how companies are responding to the refugee crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, Hungary’s neighbour. If the government does not adopt Pillar I and Pillar III of the UNGPs, what room for manoeuvre do companies have? The focus here is on how companies, domestic and foreign, multinational enterprises (MNEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), engage in humanitarian (and human rights) crisis management.

Governments sometimes adopt policies that are not aligned with their preferences or have not come onto their agendas when doing so is linked to a reward. International organizations can therefore set conditions for coveted membership that include adopting new human rights and regulatory policies. As international organizations increasingly converge around the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, how might they promote national uptake of these guidelines? This article considers the prospects of accession conditionality in answering this question. The focus of the article is on European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) expansion in Central and Eastern Europe, where uptake of business and human rights policies remains comparatively low. The article argues that while these organizations increasingly include business and human rights conditionalities in accession negotiations, there remains significantly greater scope for promoting the Guiding Principles.

Large-scale investment projects often involve contestation over competing notions of ‘development’—from promises of economic growth and integration into global value chains to perspectives that emphasise strong connections between people, territory, culture and way of life. This contestation also echoes diverse theories that have variously conceptualised development as growth, freedom, right or sustainability. This article argues that, in the face of such diversity and complexity, the notion of development that underpins international investment law tends to prioritise economic considerations. In the context of investment disputes, this can marginalise the ideas of development advanced by local actors and indigenous peoples. By connecting human rights and development in immediate terms, ongoing discussions about the right to development can provide an arena to centre ‘peoples’ as the key actor in development processes. But this normative shift would also require ensuring that the wider frameworks of international economic law recognise and provide space for plural notions of development.

In September 2023, the trial at Stockholm District Court against Orrön Energy (previously Lundin Energy) and two corporate directors for complicity in war crimes in Sudan between 1999 and 2003, started. The Lundin case is part of a trend of attempts to hold corporations criminally accountable for their alleged involvement in serious human rights abuses and provides a unique opportunity to assess the possibilities of such attempts in relation to the rights of the victims. This article analyzes how human rights obligations and the objectives of reparations for victims are satisfied by Swedish law and practice in the Lundin trial. It shows that while the law allows victims participating in trial to put forward civil claims, it denies this right to the large number of victims not participating, and the decision early in the Lundin proceedings to separate damage claims from the criminal trial has left the participating victims effectively denied reparations.

The war in the former Yugoslavia produced many highly trained and experienced combatants, some of whom engaged not only in a variety of organized criminal activities such as the illicit trade of natural resources, trafficking and corruption, but also war crimes. In the post-war environment various criminal groups took advantage of post-conflict transition conditions which enabled them to be transformed into legitimate legal entities. The failure to investigate and hold to account those involved in criminal activity meant that demobilized soldiers turned to highly profitable, legally constituted private military and security companies (PMSCs). This is coupled with poorly designed security sector reforms that often fail to enhance effective and accountable security that is respectful of human rights. In recent years, similar transformations of many former combatants and criminal groups into legitimate PMSCs around the globe have raised new concerns about their growing activities across different sectors. This article uses the former Yugoslavia as an example from which to highlight some of the increasingly common problems posed by the creation of private military and security providers globally, as a result of the current uncoordinated processes to prevent armed conflicts. The article reflects on the need to avoid smart sanctions and use other foreign policy tools, while calling for an integrated approach to security sector reform and transitional justice that is necessary for sustainable peace.

After the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) by the Human Rights Council on 16 June 2011, 15 March 2024 marked another milestone for transnational corporate governance. That day, a qualified majority of the member states of the European Union (EU) voted in favour of the Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence (CSDDD) setting human rights and environmental obligations for large companies in their global value chains.1 The CSDDD is the first region-wide due diligence legislation, yet it is also a political compromise among EU member states, which civil society and business have been watching closely. This piece explains the main elements of the CSDDD and outlines some of its implications beyond the EU.

The increasing focus on business and human rights (BHR) in civil society and policymaking has not been matched by research on corporate actions to respect and protect human rights. The lack of research on BHR is especially acute outside of Western Europe and Anglo-centric contexts. This paper seeks to investigate how the largest Russian firms conceptualize and fulfil their human rights obligations under the UN Guiding Principles and the extent to which internationalization of those firms may have impacted these behaviours. I use a unique dataset created from a sample made of the 100 largest firms listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange. Using the theoretical construct of institutional conflict, I find that cross-listing on other stock exchanges and the extent to which firms frame their broader social responsibility issues as ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ rather than ‘corporate social responsibility’ has a substantial impact on firm attention to human rights. While this attention is encouraging, firm disclosure of actions taken to mitigate against violations and protect human rights is extremely limited and the strength of domestic institutional pressures has resulted in very little firm action in the face of the extreme and widespread human rights violations being committed in Ukraine by Russia.

While divestments and decisions to exit commercial fossil fuel ventures are not new, the imperatives of the energy transition are catalysing such moves at a global industry-wide level, as oil companies position themselves for the future. The international normative framework for business and human rights provides clear guidance on how responsible divestment from fossil fuels should occur; however, in the absence of intergovernmental coordination and regulation, individual business divestment decisions create severe human rights risks. The case of Shell’s divestment from onshore Niger Delta oil production illustrates business and human rights issues relevant to the energy transition.

Batteries containing cobalt will play a central role in the global transition to cleaner energy. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, the negative human rights image of the minerals sector in the DRC, and the emergence of an inaccurate and exploitative “blood cobalt” narrative risks harming small-scale, ‘artisanal’ producers who rely on this industry for their livelihood. The DRC government, civil society and small-scale producers already have a roadmap for ending child labour and improving working conditions. Countries and companies whose economies and business interests rely on these precious natural resources should engage with this roadmap rather than disengaging from the country’s mining sector altogether.