On 24 April 2013, a building in Dhaka where European and US multinational enterprises had their production facilities collapsed, leading to the death of more than 1,100 Bangladeshi workers. The day before the collapse, a local police inspector examined the building and declared it to be unsafe. However, the workers, who were allegedly paid less than $2 a day and had manifested their discontent over cracks in the walls of the building, were forced to stay inside. Nine years later, it took a lengthy and relentless process for some surviving victims and family members of the deceased workers to access formal remedies.

The Rana Plaza episode, one of the most debated cases of workplace abuses, is an example of a rapidly growing number of public cases of corporate misconduct in the context of global supply chains. In light of this, for the past decade, efforts have been put into creating regulatory frameworks to fill the accountability gaps in the activities of multinational corporations, which have culminated in soft law instruments entailing low effectiveness. At the moment, victims of human rights abuses committed by multinational companies in developing countries, who often cannot find remedies under national jurisdictions nor the jurisdiction of developed states, are still without an international legal framework that guarantees accountability and access to remedies.

Against this background, the author of Business and Human Rights: The Obligations of the European Home States suggests an innovative approach based on strategic litigation in the European context. The thesis, which brings forward a strategy to implement systemic legal change in an ideal legal system, builds up a normative argument based on premises structured into four parts containing detailed and thorough analysis of legal sources and case law.