ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 sets out a scenario for the ‘legalization’ of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. It examines the legal nature of the UNGPs as a soft-law document, and the SRSG’s conception of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights as a responsibility that is differentiated yet complementary to the duty of States, and furthermore embedded in a global policy context. The UNGPs are set out to promote a regulatory dynamic under which the public and private governance systems (public, civil and corporate) would become better aligned and perform mutually reinforcing roles. This chapter notes how this regulatory dynamic potentially affects and coordinates the regulation of business conduct. It sees that compliance (i.e., factual adherence) by business enterprises to the corporate responsibility to respect human rights as potentially motivated by a number of factors. It argues that if the UNGPs are effectively embedded in the evolving regulatory ecosystem in the business and human rights space, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, as it is currently conceived, should also further evolve. This chapter sets out the scenario of this norm acquiring ‘binding-ness’ and normative force, including the (selective) translation of such responsibility into ‘hard’ (legally binding) norms at the national, regional and international level.
