Investor Obligations: Transformative and Regressive Impacts of the Business and Human Rights Framework

The business and human rights (BHR) framework has regularly been considered the superior legal regime of corporate accountability for business-related human rights abuses, which must be both protected from and incorporated into investment treaties. However, investment treaties have surpassed the BHR framework in an important respect: certain investment treaties impose strict international legal obligations, including human rights-related obligations, directly on investors, thereby going beyond the normatively ambiguous corporate responsibility to respect. Investment treaty reform initiatives, including those seeking to align investment treaties with the BHR agenda, should, therefore, take care to avoid inadvertently undoing this advance towards investors’ legal accountability.