ABSTRACT
Whereas in certain areas of international law, most prominently international criminal and humanitarian law, states have moved towards imposing direct legal obligations on private actors that (also) serve to vindicate values embodied in human rights,10 international human rights law traditionally has little to say about the human rights impacts of nonstate actors other than tying them back to its state-centred premises.11 According to the Westphalian orthodoxy, states are the principal subjects and authors of international human rights law that only becomes directly effective in the relationship between corporate perpetrators and individual victims of human rights violations through its translation via domestic state laws and legislation. Human rights ‘abuses’ by ‘multi-national’ corporations are treated as a domestic failure of the state and as a problem of international cooperation between states; inversely, globally operating business entities only register in international human rights law as corporate nationals of the public and territorial state.
