Introduction: Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood

Abstract

This is the introduction to a Special Issue of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies on 'Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood', with contributions by Upendra Baxi, Fleur Johns, Larry Cata-Backer, Claire Cutler, Sheldon Leader, David Bilchitz, Radu Mares, Hans Lindahl, Daniel Augenstein, and Neil Walker. One of the virtues of the more recent ‘business and human rights’ debate – most prominently the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) endorsed by the Human Rights Council in June 2011 – is that it has documented in considerable detail the significant impacts of global business operations on human rights protection in the international order of states. In response, many ‘global’ approaches to human rights protection suggest – whether explicitly or implicitly – a radical departure from human rights law’s state-centred heritage. As human rights impacts escape the state’s public and territorial authority, new private and trans-national human rights regimes emerge that fly under the radar of the state legal order yet contribute to further undermining the hegemony of its (constitutional and international) human rights law. The principal aim of the essays collected in this Special Issue, by contrast, is to examine how human rights responses to violations committed in the course of global business operations transform the boundaries of statehood constitutive of the state-centered conception of international human rights law. A guiding concern in examining this transformation is to recover the public and political nature of human rights law under conditions of globalisation.

Keywords: human rights, business, international law, statehood, governance, UNGPs, public goods