BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS / Šturma, Mozetic (eds)

12 The European Union and its Member States and the Implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

Jitka Brodská * Harald Christian Scheu

1. Introduction In the political discussion and in academic literature, there is little dispute that business activities may have a very negative impact on human rights. Already since the 1970s, international experts have been paying attention especially to those transnational economic activities that involve the exploitation of natural resources and the use of cheap labour or child labour in developing countries. 1 Over the past decades, the problem of human rights abuses caused by multinational business corporations has become even more urgent as a consequence of the dynamic processes of globalization in the fields of economy, technology, and communication. 2 These processes have put forward major challenges to the system of public international law and international human rights law. In the first place it is necessary to deal with the shift of sovereignty from states to non-state actors. International lawmakers are called upon to conceive legal norms which set relevant standards of human rights obligations and responsibilities for all relevant actors. Within the dense network of trans-border exchanges there shall be no space for impunity for human rights violators. In this contribution we want to focus on one of the most ambitious international attempts to tackle the problem of business and human rights and, in the first part of our study, we will briefly summarize the structure and contents of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights of 2011. The focus of the second part is on the implementation of the Guiding Principles from the EU perspective. We will consider some issues related to the delimitation of powers between the EU and its Member States in the field of human rights obligations. Further we will look into rather recent EU documents that deal especially with the issue of legal remedies for those whose rights have been violated in the course of business activities. * Jitka Brodská works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. The opininons expressed in this chapter are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 1 See generally on the history of transnational corporations in the context of the human rights debate WALLACE, Denise. Human Rights and Business: a policy-oriented perspective (Studies in intercultural human rights, volume 6). Leiden: Brill, 2015, p. 90-114. 2 SANTOSO, Benny. “Just Business” – Is the Current Regulatory Framework an Adequate Solution to Human Rights Abuses by Transnational Corporations? German Law Journal, 3/2017, p. 533-558.

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