GOVERNANCE BEYOND BORDERS The Extraterritorial Reach of OECD National Contact Points for Responsible Business Conduct

Abstract

As increasingly powerful actors in a globalised world, multinational corporations are often able to evade responsibility for human rights violations and other misconduct occurring in their own operations or supply chains. Since courts face limitations when attempting to exert jurisdiction outside of their state territories, state-based non-judicial mechanisms such as the OECD National Contact Points (NCPs) have been established to fill this gap by mediating between corporations and victims of corporate human rights abuses with the aim of providing remedy to the latter. The NCPs can accept complaints about corporate conduct outside of their own territories, which raises the question of whether these complaints are similarly effective as domestic cases. To investigate the impact of such extraterritorial powers on the outcome of the cases, this thesis employs a mixed-method approach. A quantitative part uses logistic regression analysis to test in a sample of 233 NCP cases between 2000 and 2022 whether extraterritoriality at least partially determines the success of complaints. The results show that extraterritorial cases are less likely to end in an agreement, although this relationship can only be detected in the data after 2011. Following this section, a qualitative part analyses two cases in a comparative case study to identify potential mechanisms that explain these findings. It finds that trust between the complainants and defendants is a key requirement for the success of the mediation, and that cultural differences and an imbalance in power can make it more difficult for NCPs to build trust between the parties.