International Cooperation in Business and Human Rights Context: A Lesson from the Right to Development

Abstract

This article argues that the contemporary Business and Human Rights framework, as crystallized in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), rests on a narrowed and depoliticized understanding of international human rights law that obscures the foundational role of international cooperation in development justice. It demonstrates that the earlier BHR project, from the 1970s through the Draft Norms in 2003, was embedded in a Right to Development (RtD)–based vision that conceived transnational corporate regulation as a problem of global economic governance, structural inequality, and popular sovereignty. Employing a doctrinal and historical method, the article reconstructs this trajectory through close analysis of UN documents, human rights instruments, and institutional practice. It shows how this normative horizon was progressively displaced by a managerial, risk-based paradigm centred on territorial state responsibility. The article then advances a systemic reinterpretation of the UNGPs through the RtD and the binding duty of international cooperation, reconfiguring the state duty to protect as a duty of transnational cooperative governance and repositioning corporate due diligence within a people-centred framework of development justice. It argues that this reinterpretation does not reject the UNGPs, but restores their capacity to address the structural and transnational dimensions of corporate power that the BHR project was originally created to confront.