This book analyses the accountability of European home States for their failure to secure the human rights of victims from host States against transnational enterprises. It argues for a reconfiguration of the relationship between multinational enterprises and individuals, both of which have been profoundly changed by globalisation. Enterprises are now supranational entities with numerous affiliates all over the world. Likewise, individuals are increasingly part of a global community. Despite this, the relationship between the two is deregulated. Addressing this gap, this study proposes an innovative business and human rights litigation strategy. Human rights advocates could file a test case against a European home State, at the European Court of Human Rights, for its failure to secure the rights of victims vis-à-vis European multinational enterprises. The book illustrates why such a strategy is needed, and points to the lack of effective legal remedies against European multinationals. The goal is to empower victims from developing countries against European States which are failing to hold multinational enterprises accountable for human rights abuses.

This book examines ways of holding multinational corporations liable for offshore human rights abuses in the courts of the companies' home States.

Explores how expert bodies and non-state empowered professionals come together to shape human rights law.

This account of business-related human rights violations details the barriers victims face when seeking remedies and offers policy solutions.

In A Transnational Human Rights Approach to Human Trafficking: Empowering the Powerless, Yoon Jin Shin proposes an innovative approach to empower individuals victimized by human trafficking, one of the most serious human rights challenges in today’s world of globalization and migration. Based on thorough empirical research and extensive comparative studies, Shin illuminates complex realities of migrant individuals experiencing trafficking situations and the problems of the current anti-trafficking regime driven by destination countries’ self-interest in crime and border control. Shin suggests an alternative transnational human rights framework, in which victimized migrants, who have been treated as passive targets of victim-witness protection or immigration regulation, finally attain their true voices as empowered rights-holders and effectively exercise their human, civil, and labor rights. Shin received the 2014-2015 Ambrose Gherini Prize, the highest prize awarded in the field of International Law by Yale Law School, for her doctoral dissertation on which this book is based.

Written by leading human rights litigators and theorists, this treatise offers a comprehensive analysis of human rights litigation in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute and related provisions.

Human rights have traditionally been framed in a vertical perspective with the duties of States confined to their own citizens or residents. Obligations beyond this territorial space have been viewed as either being absent or minimalistic at best. However, the territorial paradigm has now been seriously challenged in recent years in part because of the increasing awareness of the ability of States and other actors to impact human rights far from home both positively and negatively. In response to this awareness various legal principles have come into existence setting out some transnational human rights obligations of varying degrees. However, notwithstanding these initiatives, judicial institutions and monitoring bodies continue to show an enormous hesitancy in moving beyond a territorial reading of international human rights law. This book addresses the issue in an innovative and challenging way by crafting legally sound hypothetical "judgments" from a number of adjudicatory fora. The judgments are based on real world situations where extraterritorial or transnational issues have emerged, and draw on existing international human rights law, albeit a progressive interpretation of this law. The book shows that there are a number of judicial and quasi-judicial systems where transnational human rights claims can, and should be enforced. These include: the World Trade Organization; the International Court of Justice; the regional human rights monitoring bodies; domestic courts; and the UN treaty bodies. Each hypothetical judgment is accompanied by detailed commentary placing it in context in order to show how international human rights law can address issues of a transnational character. The book will be of interest to human scholars and lawyers, practitioners, activists and aid officials.