Enforcing the State Duty to Protect under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

With the adoption of the 2014 Declaration on Business and Human Rights, and the 2016 Recommendation CM/Rec(2016)3 on Human Rights and Business, the Council of Europe (CoE) moved some early steps toward the operationalization of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and confirmed the vanguard role that mechanisms of control of CoE human rights treaties – and first and foremost the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – may play in enforcing the first pillar’s state duty to protect. This chapter discusses negative and positive obligations that states bear under the ECHR to regulate and control corporate activities infringing human rights and scrutinizes substantive and procedural standards developed in this area by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.