工商业与人权之间的联系及其背后的根本原因

The Linkages between Business and Human Rights and Their Underlying Root Causes

学者和活动家在工商业与人权方面的争论主要集中在公司行为上。我们需要更深入地研究其结构性的、背后的原因,并由此着手采取补救措施。具体地说,公司能够通过关于外国投资和国际贸易体制的国际法来获得政治经济方面的优势地位。这些法律规范可以帮助公司不受大多数发展中国家的常规监管,这反过来又导致了监管松懈。母国的域外监管不力,加上公司因自身有限的国际法主体资格而仅负有软法性人权义务的过时观念,使这种情况进一步恶化。正是全球金融/投资架构有效地促使公司利用这种监管松懈,继而使制定更强有力的国内(基于人权和发展的)规范及适当的投资和贸易保护标准变得必要。

Scholarly and activist debate in the business and human rights conversation has largely centered on the conduct of corporations.This article suggests that we look deeper at the structural,underlying causes and commence remedial action from there.More specifically,corporations make use of the politicoeconomic space available to them from the extensive international law of foreign investment and international trade regimes.These laws are meant to favor corporations over and above the ordinary regulatory competence of(mostly)developing states,which in turn gives rise to a lax regulatory environment.This is further exacerbated by poor extra-territorial regulation in home/mother states,in addition to the outdated notion that corporations only possess soft law human rights obligations,supposedly because of their limited international legal personality.This article argues that it is the global financial/investment architecture that effectively pushes corporations to take advantage of poor governance,which in turn necessitates stronger domestic(human rights and developmental based)regulation in parallel with adequate standards of investment and trade protection.