Bridging the data gap: Exploring pillar III and victims' access to remedy

The third pillar of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights—access to remedy—seeks to ensure that when corporate human rights abuses do occur, victims have appropriate and effective remedy. Yet, some have observed that this pillar has received the least amount of attention from the scholarly and policy communities (McGrath 2015). Much of the extant literature has focused on whether corporations have or should have human rights obligations under international customary law (Martin and Bravo 2016; Karp 2014; Bird, Cahoy and Prenkert 2014; Deva and Bilchitz 2013; Gatto 2011) or how corporate responsibilities are shaped through specific state-level regulation (Bauer 2011; Knudsen and Moon 2017). To date, there is little systematic information about a number of foundational questions regarding when victims have access to grievance mechanisms and what type of mechanisms are used (cf. Olsen 2019). As such, the OHCHR’s Accountability and Remedy Project (Phase III) is a welcomed effort to bring greater awareness, improved advocacy, and more targeted policy responses to improve access to remedy for victims of corporate human rights abuse.
In this white paper, we present a novel dataset—the Corporations and Human Rights Database-Latin America (hereafter, CHRD). The CHRD is, to date, the most systematic and comprehensive source of data on allegations of corporate human rights abuse and victims’ access to grievance mechanisms in the Latin American region between 2000-2014.