LSE - Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy - Investment & Human Rights Project

On 27 November Andrea Shemberg, Visiting Fellow at the Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy (Lab), delivered a presentation about implementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) into investment policy at the 2019 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva. The panel discussion offered Shemberg an opportunity to present the research she and Andrea Saldarriaga (also a Visiting Fellow at the Lab) had conducted on the scope and substance of what the UNGPs envision. She argued that while international investment reform has narrowly focused on reforming international investment agreements (IIAs) and investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS), the UNGPs envision that reform is needed across all government functions that promote, facilitate, fund, insure and protect investment.

She also presented the six key issues identified through the research regarding what the UNGPs ask States to integrate into reform efforts. These six key issues aim to reshape traditional investment legal and policy discussions. They include:

1. Revisiting how we understand ‘investor protection’ to integrate the idea that investments are safer when they respect human rights.

2. Augmenting the current singular focus on the protection for foreign investors with a focus on addressing access to remedy in “cross-border” cases, where rules such as separate legal personality and practical difficulties such as gathering evidence across jurisdictions create special vulnerabilities for adversely impacted individuals and communities.

3. Recognising that States do not only have a right to regulate, but indeed a duty to regulate to meet their international human rights law obligations.

4. Integrating, along with the expectations of investors, those expectations of home and host States as well as individuals, communities and publics that investors respect human rights in line with the UNGPs.

5. Improving transparency and disclosure across […]

On 20 and 21 September the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) hosted an expert meeting to  help set out the scope and methodology for the third phase of the Accountability and Remedy Project (ARP), which is focused on non-State-based grievance mechanisms (i.e. company-level and other third-party grievance mechanisms). The OHCHR has been working on the ARP initiative since 2014 to address the challenges that victims of human rights abuses face when business enterprises are involved. The ARP has received multiple mandates from the Human Rights Council to deliver rigorous and evidence-based guidance to States to improve implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in the area of access to remedy, in particular, to ensure a more effective system of remedies in cases of business involvement on human rights abuses. The ARP initiative is important not only for the evidence and insights it collects on remedy but also potentially for the development of international law. This work remains a high priority for the new UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and continues to be watched and appreciated by the Human Rights Council.

Andrea Shemberg, Visiting Fellow at the Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy, participated on a research team with two researchers from the Alliance Manchester Business School to draft a scoping paper for the ARP III process. The purpose of the paper was to contribute to the OHCHR’s effort to map the current practices and challenges with respect to the use of non-state-based non-judicial grievance mechanisms (NSBGM) as a way of enhancing access to remedy in cases of adverse human rights impacts that are business-related, and to identify areas for further research, especially […]