Human Rights, Risks, and New Strategies for Global Investment

Sheldon Leader

Journal of International Economic Law, 2006, vol. 9, issue 3, 657-705

Abstract: It is often argued that the rules and practices of foreign direct investment can threaten the protection of human rights. That danger used to arise from the fact that the investors simply dismissed concern for these rights as their responsibility. This is no longer so. Major lenders and project sponsors now regularly make commitments to human rights and to allied principles governing environmental protection and health and safety. The danger instead arises from the way in which the two domains are being brought together. The collision that threatens is not over whether, but over how commercial imperatives are to be integrated with this branch of social justice. The article aims at diagnosis of the problem and considers some possible solutions to it. It frames the issues in terms of several competing fundamental principles, and draws on concrete examples from the investment contracts regulating the Baku -- Tibilisi - Ceyhan (BTC) and Chad/Cameroon pipeline projects. Once the areas of potential collision between these contracts and human rights requirements are explored, the essay considers a significant alteration to the BTC agreement, designed to open it up more effectively to human rights concerns. The analysis ends with a consideration of some model clauses for investment contracts in the future. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jieclw:v:9:y:2006:i:3:p:657-705

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Economic Law is currently edited by Kathleen Claussen, Sergio Puig and Michael Waibel

More articles in Journal of International Economic Law from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().