Symposium Posts

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¿Qué luces nos puede brindar el análisis general del estándar de debida diligencia en el derecho internacional en el campo de los derechos humanos y las empresas?

Due diligence can be required under both legal and extra-legal understandings. It has had a long presence in international law, under different regimes, offering a flexible approach that demands reasonable responses in light of the concrete circumstances. However, because of its actual demands depending on primary law, how it is and will be made operative in business and human rights law cases will depend much on its understanding, negotiations and law-making. Thus, it is important to identify risks of a “weak” multi-level adoption due to potential “corporate or economic capture” and other dynamics.

Simposio Introducción: La Debida Diligencia en el régimen de Empresas & Derechos Humanos: Una Visión desde América Latina

El pasado 21 de mayo, profesoras y profesores que integran la Rama Latinoamericana de la Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association realizaron el webinar “La Debida Diligencia en el régimen de Empresas & Derechos Humanos: Una visión desde América Latina”. El propósito del evento fue analizar la debida diligencia y su potencial impacto en las discusiones sobre el régimen de empresas y derechos humanos en dicha región.

Symposium Introduction: Due Diligence in the Business & Human Rights regime: A Latin American view

On May 21, members of the Latin American Branch of the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association organized the webinar “Due Diligence in the Business & Human Rights regime: A Latin American view”. The purpose was to analyze the potential impact that the implementation of due diligence norms and policies may have in advancing the business and human rights field in the region.

Circular economy: a concept to eliminate ‘rubbish law’?

The circular economy concept is receiving an increasing amount of attention by academics, law-and policy-makers, and private stakeholders as an alternative economic model to realise a transition to a low-carbon, sustainable future. Drivers behind the circular economy concept’s popularity include growing public awareness of plastics waste and biodiversity impacts, increasing competitiveness for natural resources globally especially amongst the G20, and innovations in bio and digital technologies.

Webinar Series II: Vulnerability in the Trade and Investment Regimes in the Age of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing vulnerabilities while creating new ones for many regions particularly in Africa, Latin America, the South Pacific and the Caribbean. COVID-19 as well as the trade wars among the major trading economies of the world that preceded it have threatened abandonment and disruption of the global trade and investment regime all the time while promising actual reform. This webinar which follows the conclusion of the four-part Symposium on COVID-19 and International Economic Law in the Global South, will explore these themes from a variety of perspectives.

A lawyer’s game, a biologist’s game, a governance game: How to conduct research on the emerging Bioeconomy in international and transnational law?

The first aim of my work is to analyse this version of Bioeconomy, its foundations, and its consequences while the second aim is to see what happens to both bioeconomies and to Bioeconomy’s interrelated normative spaces if we change the underlying idea of value from its Western/Global Northern (and Settler Colonial) constitution to alternative ones. To achieve the first goal, I follow a strategy of provincialization and for the second goal I try to strike up a dialogue with decolonial options.

Development Projects as Delivery Vehicles for Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals: A Need for Developing Deeper Insights

This contribution starts with two observations, both reflecting mainstream approaches to international economic law, international institutional law and public international law more generally. First, international development law, defined as a branch of International Economic Law (IEL) that sets out “the rights and duties of states and other actors in the development process” seldom receives the same degree of research and teaching focus typically dedicated to branches such as international trade, investment and monetary regulation – as a cursory review of the tables of contents of prominent IEL textbooks and research handbooks illustrates. Second, the same can be said about multilateral development banks (MDBs) and their development-finance operations.

International Economic Law and The Challenges in Imposing the Digital Tax in Developing African Countries

Digitalisation is changing the way we understand IEL. New streams of revenue generation resulting from online or digital economic activities remains untapped and unapplied towards steering economic growth. Despite the fact that these new digital models have been met with novel regulatory and tax approaches globally, they are proving problematic in terms of identifying the activity upon which tax should be based. This is because traditional tax rules do not contemplate digital aspects as sources of taxable income. The role of IEL in the digitalisation of the economy therefore, merits consideration, specifically in the area of domestic resource mobilisation as a factor for economic growth especially in Africa.

African Continental Economic Integration and the Multilateral Trading System: Questioning the Reliance on Differential Treatment

The aim of this piece is to contribute to the evolving debate around the AfCFTA and its relationship with the WTO. It considers whether the practice of African RTAs to rely on the Enabling Clause since 1979 should be replicated. Considering the ambition of the AfCFTA for a deep integration, aiming at liberalising trade in goods, services, investment, intellectual property, competition, etc, the Enabling Clause appears as a second-best option.

Value chain Trade: a new dawn for ‘development’?

A new economic wisdom seems to be informing the development agenda of international economic institutions, including the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO). The argument is that, although global value chains (GVCs) have existed for a long time, the pace and intensity of global interactions is rapidly changing, consisting of ever more functional ‘fractionalization’ and geographical ‘dispersion’ of production, and so is the nature of trade, with the unprecedented increase in the exchange of components and tasks originating in different parts of the world.