The field of Business and Human Rights (BHR) is attracting increasing interest from scholars from disciplines other than international law, and this book by Nadia Bernaz provides a comprehensive and easy-to-read appraisal of the hard law, soft law and private initiatives to regulate companies’ human rights conduct. As Bernaz puts it, the BHR field is about ‘preventing and addressing human rights violations by the business sector’,Footnote ¹ and the book, adopting a legal perspective, identifies normative solutions that can either prevent companies from being involved in human rights violations, or provide justice in the case of violations. The core intuition motivating this book is that there is no unique way in which human rights violations can be addressed: hard law can easily fail, while soft law and private initiatives are voluntary and have limited enforceability. The conclusion is that there are no ready-made solutions to this conundrum, but policy makers and business executives need to be aware of all these different normative options and to adopt a ‘smart mix’, which is likely to vary from context to context.

Bernaz’s book has eleven chapters, nine of which are organized in three parts. Part I, ‘Historical Highlights’, tells the story of three very important historical antecedents to human rights regulation with reference to business operations: the Atlantic slave trade and the process that led to its abolition (chapter 2), the development of international labour regulation over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (chapter 3), and the criminal prosecution of German industrialists after the second World War (WWII) (chapter 4). This Part does not aspire to be comprehensive about the early developments of business and human rights, but it very nicely picks out some very important and historical institutional developments in the regulation of business and human rights. For instance, chapter 2 describes the process that led to consideration of the slave trade as ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and morality’Footnote ² and to its subsequent regulation in Europe and elsewhere. Chapter 3, among other things, describes the development of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its conventions and treaties and, more importantly, discusses whether labour rights are human rights. Chapter 4 is important; it focuses on trials involving manufacturing companies and banks (and their executives) that supported the atrocities committed during WWII, including I.G. Farben, the producer of the pesticide Zyklon B, which was used in extermination camps.

Part II, ‘International law and policy’, covers contemporary hard law, soft law and private regulations. More specifically, chapter 5 explores international human rights law and international criminal law, providing a useful description of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and subsequent covenants and treaties, which is accessible to scholars or practitioners with no prior international law knowledge. Chapter 6 covers international trade and investment laws and identifies opportunities for accessing justice in the case of human rights violations in the context of trade agreements and investment treaties. It delves into the intricacies related to ensuring justice through arbitral tribunals or dispute settlement bodies often because these institutions tend to protect investors and their economic interests to the detriment of human rights. It concludes with some optimism that, in future, human rights clauses will be integrated into international investment and trade treaties. This is more likely if human rights gain prominence on international development agendas, and if states acknowledge and value the importance of the business sector respecting human rights. Chapter 7 focuses on soft law initiatives on business and human rights. Soft law refers to those international non-binding and recommendation initiatives often promoted by authoritative sources such as the United Nations (UN) or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Soft law initiatives include the UN Global Compact launched in 2000 by Kofi Annan, as well as the more recent UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Business and Human Rights and the human rights chapter in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which was revised in 2011 to align with the UNGPs. Finally, chapter 8 discusses companies’ own codes of conduct, public–private initiatives such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and certification schemes such as Fairtrade International and the Kymberley Process Certification Scheme. This second part of the book concludes by acknowledging the relevance of all the soft law and voluntary initiatives for creating a growing awareness about human rights and, especially, filling the voids left by international law.

Finally, Part III, ‘Domestic law and policy’, focuses on domestic law and seeks to assess the degree to which individual country courts can ensure justice in the case of human rights violations connected to business operations at home and, especially, abroad. Chapter 9 discusses regulatory policies with extraterritorial implications. The focus here is on measures that home states can take to influence the behaviour of multinational companies’ (headquartered in the home states) operations in other countries, to ensure respect and promotion of human rights. Examples include action taken in the case of multinational companies operating in South Africa during Apartheid, to public procurement and export credit policies, and reporting requirements. Chapter 10 is more technical and focuses more specifically on the legal means used by domestic courts to remedy violations through civil or criminal routes. This chapter centres on the Alien Tort Statute in the US, and on European law. This third part of the book reinforces the feeling that even the most institutionally strong countries are unable to offer a safe harbour for the victims of business-related human rights violations around the world.

Overall, Bernaz’s book reads like a primer on the normative side of business and human rights, which is likely to be useful to practitioners, as well as students and scholars from non-legal disciplines, who want to have some sort of grasp of the complexities involved in providing justice to victims of business-related human rights violations. The book does not offer novel normative solutions, nor does it try to define an overarching BHR research agenda; however, it raises awareness around these issues. Academically, it could potentially contribute to bridging the cognitive distance between BHR and other disciplines, especially management, international business and economic development scholarship, which may have something to offer to the field. In her concluding chapter, Bernaz rightly suggests that ‘there is no single reason why corporations violate human rights’Footnote ³ and that ‘numerous factors can be at play: opportunism, ignorance, weak governance, poor law enforcement, corruption, and overly competitive market, lack of management leadership and, though admittedly rarely, genuine weaknesses.’Footnote ⁴ Yet, although this list of factors seems reasonable, there is still much that we do not know about the way corporate strategies, including internationalization strategies, contribute to human rights violations, and how multinational companies’ internal capabilities and routines, their financial performance, and their headquarters–subsidiary relationships shape their chances of doing harm and of remedying it. We also know little about the extent to which companies’ endorsement of soft law initiatives, such as the UNGPs, or the adoption of either private codes of conduct or public–private and multi-stakeholder initiatives, are effective for reducing involvement in human rights abuses and the conditions that make these initiatives more likely to work. Similarly, there is a lot to learn about how different governance modes and distributions of power within global or local value chains promote rights-oriented business conduct in the different echelons of these chains. These appear to be relevant BHR research questions, which are also likely to have important policy and normative implications. These and many other questions might be addressed and answered also by the opening of this field to, and interaction with, scholars from other disciplines, both of which this book could help to facilitate by making BHR more accessible and providing an up-to-date appraisal of the field. So, well done!