Developments in Extraterritoriality and Soft Law: Towards New Measures to Hold Corporations Accountable for their Human Rights Performance?

Two of the main topics that have been discussed in the field of corporate accountability for human rights abuses are the use of extraterritoriality and the role and scope of soft law. Limitations to the use of extraterritorial adjudication have been present since the start of the debate in the United States in the middle of the 1980s. The Kiobel Case supports the idea of limiting the availability of federal courts as forums for foreign cubed cases. On the part of soft law, doctrine has tried to push its scope forward and transform it into a binding obligation, without much success. However, some developments in the field of extraterritoriality have started to break the mold: recent judgments in the UK and the Netherlands have started to recognize the existence of the liability of parent corporations for the acts of their subsidiaries. These developments could eventually lead to the apparition of new perspectives in relation to binding standards and an effective judicial remedy and regulation in the field of business and human rights.