Contributions from Latin America to the Issue of Business and Human Rights

Ius Constitutionale Commune in Latin America is a regional approach of transformative constitutionalism, which aims to transform the American continent by protecting human rights and strengthening democracy and the rule of law. The text intends to test the triple objective of this approach and its transformative ability. It will do so by evaluating the tools that ICCAL makes available to states interested in regulating corporate activities. Corporate human rights violations stem from state‘s regulatory weakness. The normative dimension of this project faces corporate economic power by offering the legal rationality needed to enhance public power to create regulatory frameworks that hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses. This proposal aims not only to question the soft law framework that currently exists, but also to address this issue from the global south perspective.

Mandatory global standards regarding human rights applicable to companies are absent. This situation has allowed businesses, particularly Transnational companies (TNCs) to consolidate themselves as subjects of important rights, but without minimum obligations to respect human rights or the environment of the local communities where they operate. Different regulatory standards in home and host-countries foster a conflict between the need to attract foreign investment and the need for diminished state power to regulate these investments and ensure human rights. The study will analyze the application of extraterritorial jurisdiction, seeking to identify and challenges that arise from the adoption of extraterritorial solutions to hold accountable corporate misconduct that violates human rights.

Private International Law (PIL) has occupied in the first decade of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Rights (UNGPs) an incidental role in the Business and Human Rights (BHR) agenda. Therefore, discussions around problems typically resolved by PIL have been absent from debates in regional forums on BHR and have been largely relegated in favor of the study of domestic law regulations. The objective of this study is to show how the UNGPs are related to PIL in Latin America, especially in relation to the issues of distribution of international jurisdiction, determination of the law applicable to multinational cases, international jurisdictional cooperation, extraterritorial effectiveness of foreign decisions and arbitration in international trade. It seeks to offer concrete recommendations to unite the agendas in the next decade that can strengthen the capacities of the BHR ecosystem in the protection of human rights in the context of the activity of companies in the region.

The present work aims to analyze the family vlogging phenomenon from the perspective of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The number of children with internet access has increased every year. According to data released by Statista, in January 2021 there were 59.5% of the global population with internet access. In the case of family vloggers, it is the parents themselves who expose their children by disclosing the family's daily life through accounts linked to digital platforms. Among the risks caused by children's exposure and access to the Internet are commercial exploitation and damage to the harmonious development of their personality. The results of this research demonstrate that companies have a responsibility to create protection methods in their systems that protect children, as well as States must promote human rights in the context of business activities and implement the international documents to which they are party.