A Study on State Duties under UNGPs Ensuring Human Rights in the Ship-Recycling Industry

The adverse human rights impact in the South Asian ship-recycling yards is not uncommon for international shipping industry since beginning of 2000s. Even if preventive measures under the Basel Convention has been established to ensure human rights in these beaching yards, the deteriorated conditions over human rights have rarely experienced improvements for workers and residents. Thus, this paper slightly deviates from current international instruments regulating ship-recycling activities, and then focus on the state duties under IHRL to ensure human rights through UNGPs. Particularly, UNGPs, in order to ensure human rights under the current regime of IHRL including the UDHR and other legal instruments, provides principles which can be applied in relation to business activities of transnational corporate. In particular, as state duties, the UNGPs prescribes state duty to protect against human rights abuses caused by the business activities and to ensure access to effective remedy for the victims. While the UNGPs has not created new obligations of states since it is not an international legal instrument, these obligations should be looked upon derived from the existing international human rights law. Therefore, this paper will examines the state duties under the UNGPs focusing on how to ensure these duties in the ship-recycling industry of South Asia where especially human rights abuses have been severe. These includes development of a new treaty for implementation of the UNGPs for a long-term and domestic measures ensuring effective remedy to the victims for a short- to mid-term.