Human rights & business: regulação e deveres das empresas emergentes de normas de proteção de direitos humanos

The HR&B theme is today one of the most challenging for legal science, and particularly for the science of Public Law. This amplitude corresponds to a quadrant determined by two different axes: that of the quantity of relevant legal-scientific aspects, and that of their depth. In fact, the problematic aspects raised by this issue are many, of great density or complexity, to which we must add their distribution across various branches of Public Law in particular (International Law, Administrative Law and European Law, in particular, but also Constitutional Law, and aspects of Political Science are also relevant — which, in fact, the Researcher Responsible for the project developed during the years in which the Legal-Political Sciences Group entrusted him with the management of that last discipline). This interdisciplinarity is further reinforced by the relationship with disciplines from other areas of legal science — namely, Legal-Economic Sciences and Legal Sciences, as, in fact, the composition of the research team reflects — and also with other scientific areas such as economics — which is also evident in the project’s team of consultants. The complexity and depth of the scientific relevance of the project cannot be enunciated in these brief lines except in a topical way, which is why its most salient points are still presented: i. The problem of non-state actors in International Human Rights Law and the susceptibility of International Law to create direct duties for private (non-state) entities. ii. The consequences of this for International Law in general. iii. The globalization of law as a consequence of the dynamics inherent in points i. and ii. iv. The responsibility of the State in relation to the actions of its nationals (especially legal entities) outside its territory when it contravenes human rights protection standards. v. Human rights as a domain of regulation by public authorities, and the correct identification of the latter in this context. saw. The rapprochement between phenomena of private power and typical manifestations of public power as justification for the extension to the former of typical mechanisms for protecting people from the latter (approximation between economic power and political power). One of the relevant scientific aspects is the extraterritoriality of European Law leveraged by HR&B regimes, a topic that the project's Principal Investigator is already developing with Prof. Doctor Nuno Cunha Rodrigues within the scope of the Jean Monet Chair of which he holds.