Corporations and Human Rights: Searching for International Norms for Corporate Conduct in Domestic Case Law

Recent years have seen much debate concerning the interplay between human rights and corporations. Part of that debate has focused on corporate violations of human rights norms and possible legal accountability mechanisms for such breaches. The present research is concerned with one such accountability mechanism, namely litigation before domestic courts seeking to enforce corporations’ international obligations and the complaints before the OECD National Contact Points (‘NCPs’). The thesis analyses how domestic courts and the OECD NCPs have conceptualised and implemented corporations’ human rights obligations. It is premised on the assumption that, through their application of international norms in their particular national context, these institutions act to crystallize and clarify the ambit of such norms.