"Soft or Hard Law? - Battling Human Rights Abuses in the Corporate World", 21 Jan 2016

Human rights abuses in multinational businesses draw immediate public attention and cause the reputation of the company to take a deep dive…Regaining lost reputation requires actions in many different fields, the legal arena being one of them. So, what judicial tools are available to battle human rights abuses?...Severe human rights abuses usually occur farther from home in the subsidiaries or supply chains of multinational companies, as was the case with Nike. Given that national legislation doesn’t reach that far, the respect for human rights has traditionally relied on companies’ voluntary commitment to soft law mechanisms, such as international standards and guidelines. However, now things seem to be changing. Europe is taking steps to introduce hard law measures to spread the corporate veil to cover operations further down multinational supply chains…The bottom line, however, is this: companies are obliged to obey and respect human rights globally, as these matters should be implemented in respective national constitutions. Thus, it doesn’t really matter whether a specific hard law measure is in use in any given country. Companies simply cannot opt out of human rights in their operations.