The Concept of Human Rights Protection and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

What does it mean to have a duty to ‘protect’ human rights? Neither political philosophy nor international political practice has furnished a single, uncontested answer to this question. In fact, one can distinguish between at least three different conceptions that are grounded in the contemporary practice of human rights. The first conception has come out of international-level work on the right to food in the 1980s, and has crystallized in the form of the respect-protect-fulfill trichotomy (hereafter: ‘the trichotomy’) (Eide et al. 1984; Shue 1996: 52–53; Koch 2005; Donnelly 2008: 124; Pogge 2011: 5–6).2 The trichotomy defines the responsibility to protect human rights in terms of a duty, which usually falls on states, to stop third parties from depriving individuals of access to the objects of their human rights. The paradigm of this first conception is a government stopping non-state actors from doing harmful things to others in domestic contexts. The second conception is even more recent, coming out of practitioner work by the International Committee on Intervention and State Sovereignty in the 1990s, and becoming further developed in the 2000s in the form of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ policy doctrine (ICISS 2001).3 It defines the responsibility to protect human rights in terms of a cosmopolitan and specifically international duty of all states to all of the people in the world.