Transnational corporations and the legal architecture of impunity: corporate social responsibility, lex mercatoria and human rights

Abstract

The strength of the new lex mercatoria for the effective protection of business interests contrasts with the absence of mechanisms for the fulfilment of their human rights obligations. There is a manifest fragility of International Human Rights Law; and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is nothing more than a soft law based on voluntariness, unilateralism and legal non-exigibility. Two decades after the paradigm of "responsible business" was launched as a supposed leap forward in the model of relations between multinationals and society as a whole, it seems clear that CSR was never intended to be an effective instrument to control large corporations. Hence the need for changes in national legislation. But also, and above all, to advance in international regulations capable of encompassing all the complexity of the large economic conglomerates, with criteria that transcend the state framework and break the apparent separation between parent company and subsidiaries.