This chapter introduces ideas and controversies in international law scholarship on business and human rights. Furthermore, it determines the legal limitations for the EU and its Member States when regulating and remedying rights violations committed by corporations from emerging and developing states. To begin, domestic measures with extraterritorial implications are discussed. Import-restrictive measures also appear an attractive solution for states that are increasingly expected (or obliged) to rein in ‘their’ corporate nationals when they violate rights in third states. Such measures allow states to create an artificial level playing field that enforces the same standards across all corporations that operate in its market. Linking rights to trade concessions is, however, contested. The International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization regimes are discussed. Finally, it is explained that each state has acted unilaterally in developing the rules governing the use of civil adjudicative jurisdiction. Support for local remedies by the extraterritorial state does not distinguish between local and foreign corporations. A cost-benefit critique of extraterritorial remediation over foreign corporations is also presented.

This chapter sets out to capture the practical phenomenon of sharing international obligations by developing a concept of shared obligations. In the stipulation of this concept, the chapter draws from and engages with various scenarios in practice that involve obligations incumbent on multiple states or international organizations, including those obligations that have been designated as ‘shared’, ‘joint’ or ‘collective’ in legal literature. By expanding on three elements that characterize a shared obligation, it is argued that the main characteristic that distinguishes obligations that are shared from obligations that are not shared is the existence of a connection between the bearers of an obligation in the performance of that obligation. It is this particular relationship between the bearers of a shared obligation that gives rise to questions regarding performance and international responsibility: who is bound to do what and, subsequently, who can be held responsible for what in case of a breach? All in all, qualifying a particular obligation as ‘shared’ brings such questions to the forefront, and thereby constitutes the first step towards addressing them.

This chapter explores the obligations of states to hold companies accountable for their human rights impacts. It focuses squarely on the obligation of home states to increase the accountability of companies operating abroad, since the critical open questions and issues in BHR arise predominantly with regard to companies’ extraterritorial conduct. Discussions around such “home-state solutions” have become a signature feature of the BHR discussion. The chapter first takes a general conceptual look at the state duty to protect and at the state's extraterritorial obligations. It then assesses different instruments that states can use to meet such obligations in the policy, legislative, and adjudicative spaces. The discussion on legislative approaches provides an overview and assessment of different types of BHR laws with extraterritorial effects that various states have adopted in recent years. The subsection on adjudicative approaches provides a brief introduction to BHR litigation and an overview of recent seminal cases in various jurisdictions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of criticisms of such extraterritorial state measures.

This chapter discusses the development of negative and positive human rights obligations under international human rights law (IHRL) and their applicability to hostage-taking. It is shown that the development of IHRL can be fundamental for the protection of the human rights of hostages, filling in the gaps left by jurisdiction in international law and state responsibility, as states have a duty to protect the human rights of hostages by adopting all possible measures to prevent hostage-taking; taking action to end the violations that hostages suffer at the hands of their abductors; investigating a hostage incident and rescue operation; and compensating the victims. Chapter 5 also discusses the jurisdictional limitations of the human rights framework which sit uncomfortably in the transboundary nature of hostage-taking. The second part of the chapter therefore reassesses the human rights obligations of states which operate beyond their borders in order to release hostages.