Business and human rights as a compensation to asymmetric investment treaty rights and obligations

This paper aims to analyze the correlation between business and human rights (BHR) regulations and investment treaties. With the economic investment dependency of host States, the imposition of rules to protect stakeholders against BHR infringements is a necessity and thus will correct inequalities caused by older investment treaties, that in some cases would forbid the host State to change their legislation to improve the welfare and human rights protections of their population. The reasoning is that possible changes could increase the costs of corporations’ activities at the host States. In such context, BHR regulations could be a source of protection for the population against investment treaties that lack human rights provisions and forbid legislation changes.