In this article… our aim is to promote a greater focus, in the context of the BHR [business and human rights] treaty debate, on regulatory effectiveness. That is, we believe that proposals for a BHR treaty should be assessed in terms of their likely efficacy, relative to other available forms of regulatory intervention, in advancing effective enjoyment of human rights in the business context. Whereas many contributions to the BHR treaty debate so far have explicitly or implicitly advocated one or other treaty model they have side-stepped the difficult question of how practically effective these models might be in influencing the conduct of duty bearers…

… [W)e seek to gauge a selection of potential BHR treaty designs by reference to just one possible criterion of regulatory effectiveness: that any new BHR instrument should not embody or promote formalistic, perfunctory, superficial state compliance, or regulatory ritualism’…

…[W]e select four possible BHR treaty variants and venture a preliminary assessment of the extent to which each may be exposed to the risk of ritualism: a broad-spectrum, single BHR treaty a narrow-spectrum BHR treaty on abuses amounting to international crimes a declaratory instrument and a framework’ convention focused on promoting domestic implementation of the UNGPs including via the mechanism of BHR national action plans (NAPs’)…