The Enforcement of Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence: From the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to the Legal Systems of EU Countries

The UN Framework on Business and Human Rights and the 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human rights are built upon the corporate responsibility to respect human rights and on the corporate human rights due diligence duty. The paper addresses this corporate obligation and postulates that its effective enforcement depends on two major issues and on the dynamics by which they interact. The first issue resides in the necessity to integrate traditionally clashing fields: human rights protection on the one hand and business governance on the other. The Guiding Principles achieve this result by merging the due diligence notion applied to international human rights law with the due diligence notion applied to corporate governance practice. The second issue resides in the acknowledgment that States still play a crucial role in any legal mechanism aspiring to enforce human rights corporate responsibility. Indeed, States have already started to impose due diligence obligations as a means to ensure corporations meet specified standards of behaviour in human rights related areas. Several jurisdictions have also enforced due diligence as a defence against charges of violation under both civil and criminal liability schemes. From this perspective, EU countries have started to play a potential vanguard role owing to the adoption of national legislation regulating corporate human rights due diligence: this set of norms provides interesting best practice examples of avenues for implementing principles enshrined in Pillar II of the UN Framework.