Causes of Action Behind Parent Companies’ Accountability for Human Rights Violations in National Courts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The vertical nature of international human rights norms presupposes states to be the addressee of human rights obligations. Therefore, there is no corporate liability for human rights abuses under international law. National legislation also does not contain any explicit rule that would allow to hold a parent company liable for human rights violations committed by its subsidiary or supplier abroad. Nevertheless, even in the absence of a clear legal basis, the national courts of Canada, France, the UK and the Netherlands, express their willingness to recognise the existence of responsibility to respect human rights on the part of corporations. Furthermore, modern case law of the aforementioned states represents possibilities to actually hold corporations liable under tort and criminal law for violations of this obligation. The reason for these “bottom — up” developments appears to be the shift of focus from corporate to victims protection. Corporate legal autonomy originated from strict corporate separation principle, as it becomes questionable nowadays. The need for the developments was born from a laissez-faire approach applied to corporations over the years that gave them the possibility to become invisible in their home states and therefore insulate liability for wrongdoings abroad. National courts of Canada, France, the UK and the Netherlands in course of their judicial practice invoke a great variety of possible causes of action to be the ground of imposing the responsibility to respect human rights on corporations and consequently holding them liable for violation of that obligation. Causes of action encompass international human rights law provisions, invocation of duty of care concept, human rights due diligence framework and criminal law provisions. However, the question whether any cause of action invoked by national courts in order to hold parent companies liable for human rights abuses committed by their subsidiaries or suppliers abroad meets the criteria of universality and applicability at the international level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".