The term ‘ambition’ appears to have infiltrated international legal discourses: it is used to, for instance, lament the lack of state action to tackle major global challenges, praise progress towards difficult goals, or evaluate the outcomes of international law-making processes. Often mobilized, the concept of ambition in international law remains, however, poorly understood. And yet, each narrative offers a specific analytical frame that influences our understanding of the world and sets distinct policy prescriptions. What argumentative functions do ambition narratives play and what implications do they carry for international law, in both its practice and study? To respond to this question, the article explores the occurrence of the term in a field where the rationale of ambition has recently taken centre stage – international climate law – and uses the crisis narrative as a means of comparison to highlight the specificity of ambition discourses. The argumentative implications of ambition are identified in terms of vision, means and temporality: this article suggests that an ambition discourse fulfils objectives that a crisis narrative is unable to accommodate by calling for structural transformations, motivating states to commit to far-reaching objectives and adopting a long-term perspective focused on incremental change. The shortcomings of an ambition narrative are also highlighted, in relation to its determination and evaluation. The study contributes to shedding light on a new international law discourse to offer a different analytical frame for the discipline.

The Sustainable Development Goal’s (SDG) blueprint to global sustainability exemplifies the global governance trend towards the displacement of law by indicators. Indicators purport to produce objective measurement and comparison, a desirable trait for international public authorities that struggle to bolster the legitimacy of environmental and sustainability norms. This paper adopts a pragmatic approach to indicators by taking seriously their limitations, weaknesses, and dangers, but also their potential contributions to international sustainability objectives. We explore a reframing of the relationship between law and indicators in complementary, not adversarial, terms. Several examples of this complementarity are explored, including the potential use of the SDGs for evaluating the instrumental effectiveness of legal regimes, as well as the ways that international sustainability law supplements the SGDs by providing legal ramifications for violations of state-specific obligations. Finally, we argue that law and legal normativity make invaluable contributions to international environmental and sustainability governance, contributions that metrics and other managerial and technocratic forms of governance cannot make.

One of the central components of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is its victim assistance and environmental remediation provisions (known collectively as the Treaty’s ‘positive obligations’). While there is much to celebrate about efforts to remedy the damage caused by nuclear weapons, the way the TPNW distributes responsibility for this work is troubling. Under the Treaty, the primary responsibility for fulfilling the positive obligations is placed on the states parties that have individuals under their jurisdiction who are affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons and areas under their jurisdiction or control that have been contaminated by the use or testing of nuclear weapons (‘the affected states’) despite the fact that, often, these were not the states responsible for detonating the nuclear weapons. This article examines and critiques the reasons the Treaty’s drafters placed the main responsibility for victim assistance and environmental remediation on affected states. It argues that the rationales underpinning these provisions rest on shaky grounds, and that the Treaty’s approach has potential negative ramifications for nuclear disarmament and understanding the history of the use and testing of nuclear weapons. Further, it explores how the Treaty may play into worrying broader dynamics in public international law whereby the Global North is frequently absolved of responsibility for the harms it causes while the Global South is saddled with obligations to redress an array of harms.

The European Court of Human Rights has often been criticized for lacking clarity and consistency in its reasoning of balancing human rights against conflicting public interests. To reconcile national security with human rights protection, the Court requires the interference with rights to be suitable for reaching the objective purported by the government. In this article I deal with how the Court conducts the suitability test in national security cases, in line with two models under which a few representative test considerations can be categorized: human rights priority model and national security priority model. To explain how each model works in a comparable sense, I follow the same analytic structure and examine the manner of the Court’s test and the intensity of its scrutiny. I argue that in compliance with the two models, the Court applies the suitability test in a consistent and predictable way in national security case law.

The long-simmering process of sidelining and side-stepping migrants’ rights protection while attempting to regulate cross-border movement of people was heated up by the 2015 migration crisis and has recently been brought to the boil with the crisis-fuelled adoption of the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in 2018. The GCM represents an endorsement at the international level of soft-law, goal-setting frameworks for international co-operation on migration as it pertains to migrants’ rights, and a corresponding disavowal of any role for binding legal obligations in this field. Focusing on the EU, I argue in this article that states’ sovereign powers in the realm of control of non-EU migration have been largely undiluted by the development of the international system of human rights protection. I show how the 2015 migration crisis galvanized multilateral international co-operation on the part of the EU and its member states in the field of non-EU migration in a way that entrenched EU states’ sovereign self-interest by institutionalizing a soft-law approach, thereby producing a crisis from the perspective of migrants’ rights protection. I also argue, however, that the migration crisis facilitated a resurgence of state sovereignty in the EU to the detriment not only of migrants’ rights, but also of internal EU co-operation and co-ordination. Finally, I suggest that in times of crisis supranational courts are particularly susceptible to being recruited to EU states’ rights-restrictive approach to international migration.

We introduce this symposium of articles by explaining the notions of hard and soft law, and reviewing UN developments on business and human rights in this light. We move to a more detailed discussion of existing hard law, particularly the state duty to protect, before examining examples of fulfilment of that duty via the domestication (especially the judicialization) of human rights norms for business. We also note the many pitfalls in contemporary approaches, before examining how the proposed legally binding instrument might address those pitfalls. We conclude with commentary on how soft and hard norms to date have failed to grapple with corporate power, the issue which animates the need for a business human rights debate in the first place, before introducing the articles to follow.

Unlike its European counterparts, Canada appears to remain firmly entrenched in a soft approach to ensuring that Canadian extractive companies respect human rights abroad. Canada’s powerful extractive industry has been very successful in resisting attempts to introduce hard law measures to regulate their transnational conduct. This article considers business and state motivations for supporting or pursuing the shift to hard law measures in the business and human rights context. It assesses Canada’s 2022 policy on responsible business conduct and the implications of the government’s failure to endow the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise with the necessary powers to engage in credible independent investigations of transnational business conduct. It also considers the potential impact of three leading cases brought in Canadian courts against Canadian extractive companies in relation to their overseas operations. The article argues that these developments may not yet be sufficient on their own to shift extractive sector views on the introduction of domestic human rights due diligence legislation. It concludes with some thoughts on the impact that the legislative developments in Europe and treaty negotiations at the United Nations may have in Canada.

Mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD) laws in the European Union (EU) – both enacted and in the making – seem to be a promising tool to harden soft international standards in the business and human rights (BHR) field, the most prominent of these being the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This article develops a two-layered critique of mandatory HRDD laws. It problematizes the very concept of HRDD as articulated by the UNGPs. I will argue that due to various conceptual, operational and structural limitations, HRDD alone will not bring the desired changes for rightsholders, because this process does not address various asymmetries of power between corporations and affected communities. The second layer of critique concerns the content of mandatory HRDD laws enacted in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Germany. Assessing these laws vis-à-vis six preconditions required to protect effectively people and the planet from business-related harms, it is clear that these mandatory HRDD laws are half-hearted attempts to tame business-related human rights abuses and hold the relevant corporate actors accountable. In addition to developing more ambitious mandatory HRDD laws in future, states should employ a range of additional regulatory tools that pay greater attention to achieving outcomes, drawing red lines in certain situations, and promoting access to remedy and corporate accountability.

Human rights violations by corporations are widespread and have a broad spectrum: damage to people’s health through pollution, environmental accidents and health and safety failures, forced labour or child labour, underpaid workers, displaced communities, contaminated water sources, use of excessive force, and discrimination, for example by race, gender or sexuality. Corporate violence, resulting from a long history of corporate power and colonialism continues today as corporations have grown into powerful global conglomerates. Through complex and opaque multinational groups and supply chains, use of corporate law concepts such as the corporate veil, as well as other actions such as tax avoidance and lobbying of national and international political institutions, corporate actors remain free to pursue their goals. Despite efforts to combat corporate harm through the development of a business and human rights movement success has been limited and significant gaps remain in the global governance required to ensure protection. This article argues that, similar to a cat and mouse game, corporations find new ways to defend themselves against those seeking to dismantle their power or to prevent human rights infringements. The problem is rooted in structural and systemic inequalities within the international legal framework and in company laws that maintain corporate structures that obstruct the human rights movement’s progress. The current drive towards a more sustainable business agenda requires a just transition, including transformation of global and corporate structures to tackle human rights violations and the inequalities of power and wealth that facilitate such violations.