-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Daniel Augenstein, Torture as Tort? Transnational Tort Litigation for Corporate-Related Human Rights Violations and the Human Right to a Remedy, Human Rights Law Review, Volume 18, Issue 3, September 2018, Pages 593–612, https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngy023
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
1. INTRODUCTION
In an early important contribution to the debate on transnational corporate accountability for human rights violations, Scott complained about the tendency of lawyers ‘to organise the normative world of human rights in terms of (unduly) dichotomous ways of thinking’.1 On the one hand, the ‘(stylised) restrained conservative’ maintains that ‘international human rights standards are a matter of public law (vertical) applicability, wherein corporate conduct is regulated through indirect state responsibility which attaches only to corporate harm caused within a state’s own territorial space’. On the other hand, the
(stylised) activist radical insists that international human rights standards are (not only, but) also a matter of private law (horizontal) applicability wherein corporate conduct may be regulated through direct liability which is capable of attaching to harm caused by corporate conduct outside the state’s own territorial space.2
Thus, dichotomising human rights into ‘torture’ (as regulated by public international law) and ‘tort’ (as regulated by private international law) conceals how both systems of norms are engaged in a ‘two-way normative traffic’ through which one becomes translated into, and accommodated within, the other.3
