Dataset Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights

The question of human rights violations that involve business enterprises has increasingly led to demands for laws and norms regulating business behavior. While the development of (non-binding) norms has successfully contributed to the establishment of a normative regime in the issue area of Business and Human Rights (BHR), the question of binding regulations is still a matter of highly controversial debates, both at an international and state level as well as at a regional level. The United Nations is one of the focal points for these debates which led, among others, to the establishment of an intergovernmental working group in order to draft a binding treaty. The United Nations open-ended intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights (OEIWG) was established by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2014 with a mandate to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises” (HRC Resolution 26/9, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/26/9). The dataset “Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights” (BTBHR) contains all submissions by states and non-state actors to the OEIWG, plus a selection of external commentaries. The dataset was developed in the research project “Business Actors beyond Public and Private. Authority, Legitimacy and Responsibility in the United Nations Human Rights Regime” (BAPP): https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/398306144?language=en. The research project is headed by Janne Mende, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), project number 398306144. It is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (2020–2021) and the Justus Liebig University Giessen (2018–2020). The dataset was established with the extensive support of Marcel Frentzel, a student assistant in the BAPP research project.