Overview
This chapter is written from the practitioner perspective. We explore a practical challenge to corporate human rights accountability: the uncertain legal standard of care. Our argument proceeds in five stages. First, we provide an overview of the emerging framework of corporate human rights responsibility in voluntary standards and law. Second, we highlight the importance of transnational torts—particularly styled as negligent risk management — in the emerging web of potential legal accountability for companies that fail to respect human rights. But this discussion comes with a meaningful caveat: to date, no court has determined the legal standard of care for a company in such cases. Third, we turn to the contours of a potential standard of care grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Drawing on an archetypal fact pattern involving mining company impacts on environmental rights, we illustrate why the best candidate against which to assess the effectiveness of a parent company's management of human rights risks is the Guiding Principles. Fourth, we turn to the practical risk-management requirements of the Guiding Principles to illustrate that an effective system would be grounded in a set of consistent indicators of harm derived from international human rights law. Fifth, we focus on the scope of the right to health under international law to illustrate the complexity of deriving meaningful, principled, and practical definitions of harm to integrate in a company's Guiding Principles-aligned risk-management system. The implication of this argument is that 'business and human rights litigation' will remain limited in what remedies it can meaningfully deliver to stakeholders until we have an authoritative method to establish what constitutes a corporate wrong with reference to international human rights law.
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This material has been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press, and a revised form will be published in The Cambridge Handbook on Litigating Business and Human Rights Violations: Themes, Perspectives, and Prospects, edited by Hassan Ahmad, Ekaterina Aristova and Rachel Chambers. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. ©Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026.
