Business and Human Rights: Making the Legally Binding Instrument Work in Public, Private and Criminal Law

The paper’s starting point is the United Nations Human Rights Council working group’s revised draft of a Legally Binding Instrument to Regulate, in International Human Rights Law, the Activities of Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises of July 2019. The paper examines the draft treaty’s potential to activate and operationalize public law, private law, and criminal law for enforcing human rights. It conceptualizes a complementary approach of these three branches of law in which private and criminal legal enforcement mechanisms stand in the foreground. It argues for linking civil (tort) and criminal liability for harm caused by hands-off corporate policies, complemented by the obligation to interpret managerial duties in conformity with the human rights standards of public international law. The combination of public, private, and criminal law allows effective enforcement of human rights vis-à-vis global corporations

Reflections on the Liberal University: Truth, citizenship and the role of the academic

The starting point for this paper is the fact that the organisation and practice of higher education, and our ideas about it, are informed by conflicting ideals. I explore some of this conflict by looking in detail at what I call the liberal model of the university, and at two competitors to it that have gained increasing influence in recent years: the economic and ideological models. I examine the main criticisms of the liberal university, and what I believe to be its strengths in comparison with these other two models