Regulating Business in Illegal Occupations: The Duty of Non-Assistance Revisited

Private businesses may play a significant role in consolidating illegal occupations by operating in illegally occupied territories. However, as it stands today, international law offers few options for holding private corporate actors legally accountable for their harmful activities in illegally occupied territories. This creates a legal vacuum in the protection of the local population under illegal occupation and allows businesses to benefit from normalised breaches of peremptory international law.

Various branches of international law, including human rights law, IHL, international environmental law and the law of the sea, are exploring the possibility of imposing positive due diligence obligations on home states to regulate transnational conduct of their corporate nationals. This book will examine whether the insights gained on due diligence to regulate transnational business conduct in the aforementioned areas of international law can be transposed mutatis mutandis to the context of the customary duty of non-assistance, due to their significant similarities with the book’s central research issue.

By introducing a novel, positive reading of the duty of non-assistance – which would not only oblige home states not to render aid or assistance to situations breaching norms of jus cogens, but also to take all necessary measures to ensure that their corporate nationals do not contribute to the maintaining of illegal occupations – this book aims to offer an additional, innovative legal avenue to tackle potentially harmful business conduct in illegally occupied territories and provide concrete guidance on how policymakers, legal practitioners, and businesses should cope with the obligation’s implications on the ground.