Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights

This is an open access book.

This open access book consolidates a collection of scholarly papers presented at the academic conference titled "Corporate Human Rights Responsibility in OECD Case Law: Actors, Issues, Responsibilities, and Remedies", held on 4 and 5 May 2023. The conference was organized by the OECD Case Law Project at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

The book is divided into three sections. The first examines how NCP cases interpret corporate responsibilities, including financial institutions, on human rights and environmental issues, focusing on climate change and conflict-affected zones. It also highlights how OECD cases address corporate accountability and its impact on the revised OECD Guidelines and the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

The second section critically evaluates the NCP mechanism's effectiveness, assessing whether it provides substantive remedies and how well NCP mediation resolves disputes. It offers both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the grievance processes in line with UNGP effectiveness criteria.

The third section explores the NCP’s role in global corporate responsibility frameworks, particularly its potential influence on shaping mandatory due diligence obligations through frameworks like the CSDDD, reinforcing corporate accountability in international business practices.

Additionally, the book offers key recommendations for policymakers, NCP experts, and practitioners on improving the NCP system to ensure more meaningful outcomes for human rights violations.

This Open Access book explores an issue that has received little attention in human rights research: organised criminal groups (OCGs) as perpetrators of human rights violations, especially disappearances. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining doctrinal legal research with a qualitative study on present-day disappearances in Mexico. Disappearances are a complex human rights violation that impacts not only the disappeared person but also their relatives, who are left in a limbo of uncertainty about their loved one’s fate. Originally part of state-led repression, today disappearances occur in varied contexts, often involving OCGs and other non-state actors. However, disappearances committed by non-state actors are not human rights violations under International Human Rights Law (IHRL), thereby potentially leaving a gap in the legal protection of victims. The book first analyses state obligations and case law involving state responsibility for human rights violations committed by non-state actors and applies the analysis to OCGs. This ‘internal’ legal perspective is complemented by an ‘external’ study based on interviews with human rights practitioners working on disappearances in Mexico, which often involve OCGs. The qualitative study offers a unique perspective on human rights protection ‘in reality’.

The book adds to scholarship on non-state actors and disappearances, and to incipient international legal scholarship on the issue of organised crime and international law. Moreover, the study on Mexico provides a richer understanding of challenges faced by practitioners ‘on the ground’ where OCGs commit human rights violations alongside, or in collusion with, state forces and against the backdrop of an overall failure of the state. The book may be of interest to a diverse audience, including legal scholars and practitioners, human rights scholars in fields such as political science, international relations, or socio-legal studies, as well as funders supporting the work of NGOs in Mexico and similar contexts, and NGOs themselves.