Amicus Brief – Human Rights and Climate Change 4. The business and human rights regime 41. States have an obligation to protect individuals within their jurisdiction from corporate violations, including by ensuring access to remedy for affected individuals.113 The Business and Human Rights regime consists of hard and soft rules under international law and domestic law that regulate the relationship between the state, corporate entities and individuals. The regime centres on the state’s duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and the individuals’ right to an effective remedy. The duty to investigate, like the duty to prevent, is not breached merely because the investigation does not produce a satisfactory result…An investigation must have an objective and be assumed by the State as its own legal duty, not as a step taken by private interests that depends upon the initiative of the victim or his family or upon their offer of proof, without an effective search for the truth by the government.114 As a result, a web of hard and soft international and domestic human rights law norms imposes duties on corporations, including in relation to environmental impacts. 42. International law clearly imposes upon States wide-ranging obligations to protect the human rights of individuals from infringements by third parties, including corporations. As a consequence, states must take measures to ‘prevent, punish, investigate or redress the harm caused … by private persons or entities’.115 The state duty to protect the human rights invoked by the petitioners – to life,116 to health,117 to food,118 to water,119 to sanitation,120 and to housing121 – from corporate violations, is well-established in the interpretative work of UN treaty bodies and UN special procedures, and in international jurisprudence.122 In addition to the work of Special Rapporteur Knox, other international human rights bodies have identified protective duties in relation to the environmental impacts on human rights.123 States ordinarily prevent, stop, or obtain redress or punishment for third party interference through state regulation of private party conduct, inspection and monitoring of compliance, or administrative and judicial sanctions enforced against noncompliant third parties, such as polluting industries.124 43. The existence of corporate obligation to respect must be presumed given the uncontested existence of the state obligation to protect. A different finding would amount to a nonsensical situation, whereby corporate violations could not be prevented, punished, investigated, or redressed – although they must be, under the state duty to protect – because corporations would not, in the first place, have an obligation not to violate human rights. As such, the logical inference must be that the positive obligations of states to protect human rights disclose the scope of the human rights obligations of corporations. There is therefore an inherent link between the positive obligations of states to protect human rights, corporations’ human rights obligations, and the obligations of States and corporations to provide individuals with access to remedies for breaches of their human rights.125 The state duty to protect, the corporate responsibility to respect, and access to remedy form the three pillars of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework126. This instrument was drafted by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights and unanimously endorsed by the HRC in 2011.127 The Special Representative explained that While they do not by themselves constitute a legally binding document, the Guiding Principles elaborate on the implications of existing standards and practices for States and businesses, and include points covered variously in international and domestic law.128 15