Chapter three examines several selected instruments created to regulate SOEs at international, regional and domestic level and seeks to determine their effect on international law. At international level the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the OECD Guidelines on the Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises, the OECD Common Approaches for Officially Supported Credits and Environmental and Social Due Diligence, the ILO Tripartite Declaration Concerning Multinational Enterprises, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Sovereign Wealth Funds Generally Accepted Principles and Practices and the Global Compact are particularly relevant for SOEs. At regional level, public procurement may represent a key regulatory opportunity for SOEs from a human rights perspective and to this end this section provides an analysis of the EU Public Procurement Directives. The section on domestic approaches to SOE regulation analyses measures that have been taken by several States to address the human rights dimension of State corporate ownership.

This chapter provides a critical overview of the UNGPs and its three predecessors: the 1990 Draft Code, the Global Compact, and the Draft UN Norms. The current BHR treaty process, which is dealt with elsewhere in this book, is touched upon briefly because of space constraints. In providing an overview of various attempts at the UN level to regulate corporations, two arguments are made in this chapter. First, we should see the UNGPs as part of a continuing process to develop standards at the UN level, rather than as a complete new start. Second, it is argued that the UN has made too little and too slow progress in putting in place an effective regulatory regime. In making such an assessment about the progress made so far in ‘humanizing business’, the author attempts to step in the shoes of rights holders, because progress could be interpreted differently from the perspective of different stakeholders.

This chapter summarizes developments in international human rights law, mechanisms, and policies since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. We first describe the nine core human rights treaties, including the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which together converted the Declaration’s ideals into international law, and the seven conventions with the goals of eliminating racial discrimination, discrimination against women, torture, and enforced disappearances, and protecting the rights of children, migrant workers, and their families, as well as persons with disabilities. We follow with summaries of the Genocide Convention and of the UN declarations proclaiming the rights of indigenous peoples and LGBTI individuals. We next describe the UN mechanisms for advancing human rights, including the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Council, and International Criminal Court. These are followed by summaries of UN policies for protecting persons from governmental abuses, ending the world’s worst poverty and suffering, and providing human rights guides for businesses. We then summarize developments in international humanitarian law (the laws of war) and conclude with a brief overview of the five regional human rights systems.

This chapter reviews our basic claim: refugee-led organisations exist, and they deserve recognition for the important roles they play. We draw out comparative analysis of RCOs based on nationality and leadership and the political economy in which they partake, and discuss practical and theoretical implications. Many RCOs offer social protection to refugees and fill gaps left by national or international providers in areas as diverse as education, vocational training, psychosocial support, health, microfinance, sport, youth engagement and legal representation. They vary in scale, focus and capacity, demonstrating the many ways in which refugees mobilise to support vulnerable members of the community. They are providing protection and assistance – the very services normally associated exclusively with international aid agencies and NGOs. For many refugees, especially those in cities, such sources of community support are perceived as more relevant to their lives than those provided by large-scale aid organisations. Yet refugee-led organisations rarely receive recognition or funding from the international humanitarian system. A deeper understanding of how they have and can contribute to refugee aid and development can act as a crucial next step to begin restructuring the architecture of assistance.

This chapter introduces the key ideas and questions that inform this work, as well as the overall structure of the subsequent chapters. Across the low- and middle-income countries that host 85 per cent of the world’s refugees, protection and assistance is provided to refugees by United Nations organisations in collaboration with a network of NGO ‘implementing partners’. The dominant humanitarian model is usually premised upon a provider-beneficiary relationship: international organisations are the protectors and refugees are the protected. In parallel to this model, however, is a largely neglected story: refugees themselves frequently mobilise to create community-based organisations or informal networks as alternative providers of social protection. They mobilise bottom-up to provide sources of assistance to other refugees in areas as diverse as education, health, livelihoods, finance and housing. Despite their importance to refugees, however, for a number of reasons introduced in this chapter, refugee-led organisations (sometimes referred to as refugee community organisations, or RCOs) generally receive little international recognition or support.