The potential and limits of law and legal analysis are questions about social, economic and political power.
My current Masters (LLM) students are in Week 6 of their fully online 'Business and Human Rights' course. We are currently discussing barriers to accessing an effective remedy for alleged business-sourced human rights violations. Much of this discussion revolves around transnational torts litigation, and the doctrinal + practical barriers to claimant groups.
In the discussions we have canvassed criminal law 'remedies' and I referred students to a news item about allegations against a French cement giant for its subsidiary's conduct in war-torn Syria (here). In one commentary on that news, the author says:
"Human rights cases are rarely a question of law alone, they are about power."
This is an apposite for all students of 'Business and Human Rights' (BHR, and we are all students thereof!).
BHR scholars repeatedly self-profess that theirs is a 'cross-disciplinary' field that is nevertheless dominated by legal scholars. The field's maturation will require a far more systematic and contextualised engagement with the political economy and power dynamics of everything from transnational litigation to supply chain transparency.
Law can be powerful, even emancipatory; but power differentials and dynamics that constrain and distort this transformative potential need greater and more context-specific analysis by all of us working in this field.
Jo
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