CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN MULTINATIONAL BUSINESS OPERATIONS: EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INTERNATIONAL LEGAL FRAMEWORKS

Abstract

Multinational enterprises now operate across more jurisdictions, employ more people, and command more capital than many of the states in which they do business, yet the international legal system built around the sovereign state has struggled to hold them to account when their operations cause serious human rights harm. This article employed doctrinal approach in evaluating the effectiveness of the principal international legal frameworks that have emerged to close that accountability gap: the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the ILO's Tripartite Declaration, the stalled UN treaty process, and the patchwork of domestic litigation, from Alien Tort Statute claims in the United States to parent company duty-of-care litigation in the United Kingdom, that victims have turned to in the absence of a binding international regime. Drawing on the Ogoniland litigation arising from Shell's operations in Nigeria's Niger Delta as a recurring case study, the article argues that the existing framework has produced real, if uneven, gains, most visibly in expanding the circumstances in which parent companies can be sued in their home jurisdictions, but that it remains fundamentally reactive, jurisdictionally fragmented, and dependent on the willingness of individual victims to litigate for years against better-resourced corporate defendants. It concludes that meaningful accountability will require binding home-state due diligence legislation and a credible international instrument, rather than continued reliance on voluntary standards alone.