ABSTRACT
The two previous chapters have highlighted the limitations of the current international legal framework regarding business and human rights. This chapter leaves international law strictly speaking to the side and focuses on soft law initiatives which have blossomed in this field in the past few decades. Because of their non-binding, recommendatory nature, these initiatives go hand in hand with self-regulation, which is covered in the next chapter on private modes of regulation. When the United Nations began developing standards of behaviour for
multinational corporations in the 1970s, business and human rights was not a discrete field of study. Instead, the UN focused on the regulation of foreign direct investment, which included the regulation of multinational corporations, in human rights and other fields, as well as host states’ obligations regarding the treatment of foreign investors. The scope was therefore wider than simply ‘business and human rights’. By contrast, current business and human rights initiatives are narrow in scope. Nowadays, the treatment of foreign investors and corporations’ human rights responsibilities tend to be considered separately, and have led to the development of distinct regulatory frameworks. This is perhaps for the best given that, as seen in this chapter, the former was always more problematic. On the negative side, while it is possible to separate the two questions, this leads to a somewhat artificial divide. Although they overlap considerably, international investment law and the international regulation of multinational corporations in the human rights field have evolved separately. By looking at investment law and the international regulation of multinational corporations in two different chapters, the structure of this book reflects the divide – as artificial as it may be.1
