Reframing access to remedy for corporate human rights violations: Examining power and epistemic injustice in non-judicial grievance mechanisms

The right to remedy is a core human right. Without it, many argue, all other human rights lose their meaning. Yet for rights holders harmed by business activities and development projects, enjoying this right proves virtually impossible. Non-judicial grievance mechanisms (NJGMs) have gained increased attention in the last few decades as a complementary avenue to seek remedy for those types of harms. NJGMs have seen little success in practice, despite the formal preoccupation with improving remedy. More than three decades after the first grievance mechanism was established for harms caused by development finance projects, and almost 15 years after the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) -- which put NJGMs into focus – these mechanisms continues to fall short of their stated aims of providing access to remedy and actual remedy outcomes. To better understand these shortcomings in access to remedy through NJGMs, the research project applies a new theoretical lens centered on power and epistemic injustice. It critiques the failures of BHR to adequately engage with power and its role in reproducing epistemic injustices through a critical examination of how the mainstream discourse on remedy for business and development-related harms through non-judicial mechanisms has, since its inception, worked against those seeking remedy. The project revisits the development of the UNGPs through a Foucault-inspired genealogy that examines how power was practiced in that process, critically re-examines its claims of inclusion, and interrogates the epistemic resources that it produced. The project analyzes data gathered through focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and observation of multi-stakeholder events considered by some to be spaces of governance or accountability politics. The analysis points to where and how epistemic injustices may occur in those spaces, either as the result of practices of power or through passive reliance on biased structures or (sometimes unconscious) biases. It begins to unpack where and how practices of corporate power influence mediated dialogues in NJGM processes and constrain debates on remedy in deliberative spaces. The research argues that a reframing of remedy in this context is needed. One that more robustly navigates power and addresses the problem of epistemic injustice.

Publisher

University of Galway

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CC BY-NC-ND

cbn

Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)