Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises: Normative Innovations and Implementation Challenges

Abstract

Business and human rights became an increasingly prominent feature on the international agenda in the 1990s. Global markets widened and deepened significantly as a result of trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and off-shoring production as well as financial centers. The rights of multinational corporations to operate globally became legally enshrined in a vast expansion of bilateral investment treaties and investment chapters of bilateral and regional free trade agreements, as well as a new international regime protecting intellectual property. According to one UN study, some 94 percent of all national regulations related to foreign investment that were modified in the decade from 1991 to 2001 were intended to facilitate it.' Multinational corporations did well subsequently, and so too did people and countries that were able to take advantage of the opportunities created by this transformative process.