March 11, 2026

Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Manuel Couret Pereira Branco e Hermes Augusto Costa

Contemporary societies have been marked by the rise of globalization, which brought important actors to the global scenario: multinational corporations. Globalization also facilitates the flow of goods and services, encouraging enterprises to increasingly outsource part of their productive chain processes to low-cost countries. This, however, imposes a high social cost to workers operating under the business-as-usual model, most especially for people at the bottom of the pyramid, which are the most vulnerable ones in any value chain. A set of business and human rights initiatives have been emerging in the last couple of years, including voluntary instruments such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, coupled with legally binding ones such as the EU CSDDD (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive), that - despite regional - is going to have global reach, the United Nations Treaty on Business and Human Rights, as well as local law initiatives that is also going to demand corporations to perform Human Rights Due Diligence processes - these all as attempts to encourage and require corporate best practices. The question that remains is how effective such instruments are (or are going to be) as even hard-laws texts are influenced by companies, reinforcing the power enterprises - especially multinational ones - hold in contemporary societies. With that in mind, this research aims to investigate how corporations have been implementing their responsibility to respect human rights when it comes to providing effective remedy and how they are establishing accessible and transparent mechanisms that support adversely affected workers in their journey to seek justice as stated in the third pillar of the UNGPs. Most importantly, the ultimate goal of this research is to access how and if workers have been benefitted from such corporate initiatives. Taking into consideration that the garment sector ranks amongst the most critical ones in the economic system, the main investigation focus are workers at the initial-end of this particular industry as they represent the most vulnerable stakeholders in the overarching chain, therefore more subject to human rights violations, thus to the need of redress. Some of the main targets are to understand if workers are aware of grievance mechanisms implemented by corporations as a means to seek justice for human rights violations; if so, if workers can access such channels; and if so, if workers trust the process and in a non-retaliation policy once they file a complaint.Key words: Access to Remedy, Access to Justice, Human Rights, Human Right to Work, Human right to Effective Remediation, Human Rights Due Diligence, Global Value Chains, Stakeholders, Rightsholders, UNGPs, Corporations, Business, Garment Sector.

Keywords: Access to Remedy; Human Rights and Business; Human Right to Work; UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights; Global Value Chain