A Preliminary Exploration of Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence Law from the Perspective of Labor Protection
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/ym47tf48Keywords:
Mandatory human-rights due-diligence law, Duty-bearers, Public regulation, Private governanceAbstract
In response to the recurring violations of labor rights within global value chains, the international community has witnessed the emergence of a new legal governance mechanism exemplified by “mandatory human-rights due-diligence law”. The hallmark of such legislation is the creation of a statutory “due-diligence” obligation for companies, seeking to recast multinational enterprises as pivotal nodes in the governance of labor standards across their supply chains and to leverage their commercial influence to transmit compliance pressure throughout the entire value chain. Focusing on mandatory human-rights due-diligence law, this article analyzes how they achieve extensive extraterritorial reach over global value chains through distinctive ways of delineating the duty-bearing subjects and through the dual pathways of public regulation and private governance. By innovatively expanding the circle of legal duty bearers and by simultaneously deploying public-regulation channel and private governance channel, mandatory human-rights due-diligence law is transforming labor-rights protection from a traditional jurisdictional framework into a new model of global value-chain governance in which multinational corporations act as the primary enforcement intermediaries.
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