This book is the first milestone of the research project Human Rights & Business: regulatory framework and corporate duties, which took its first steps in 2021, in the “CIDP | Lisbon Public Law”, the Research Center in Public Law of the Legal-Political Sciences Institute, of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon (FDUL). This hard copy is the selection of core legal documents (soft and hard law) on human rights and business (HR&B), from a larger collection published in eBook in parallel.
Today, the HR&B topic is one of the most “tip of the spear” challenges for legal science, and particularly for the science of Public Law, spreading across several branches of Public Law, notably International Law, Administrative Law and European Law in particular, but also Constitutional Law, and also some aspects of Political Science are still relevant. This interdisciplinarity is further reinforced by the relation with disciplines from other areas of legal science – namely, Legal-Economics and Private Law, as the composition of the research team reflects, including the project’s pool of advisers.
The HR&B project intends to produce legal scientific knowledge that can be translated into practical aspects, as an instrument that can be used by companies to adapt their modus to comply with international rules and standards in this matter. Thus, it is a project that is both scientific and of capacity building, and that might help Portuguese companies in their internationalization. In fact, we’re on the path towards a reality in which non-compliance with these rules and standards will create obstacles, if not impediments, to access certain markets (public and private), access to credit, or which will make the operation of the “non-compliant” economic initiative more expensive and less sought after.