This article builds on the recommendations of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights to argue for the integration of access-to-remedy clauses into international investment agreements (IIAs). It contends that international investment law (IIL) exhibits imperialist tendencies, privileging corporate interests while neglecting rightsholders and thereby entrenching systemic injustice. Using the framework of legal imperialism, the article highlights how existing investment regimes create structural imbalances that deny victims’ meaningful redress. Moving beyond proposals limited to procedural reform within IIL, it advances a normative case for incorporating remedy clauses into IIAs, particularly to enable rightsholders to pursue claims in host states where harms occur. Drawing on examples from the Global South, it identifies persistent barriers such as jurisdictional hurdles and enforcement gaps. The article’s contribution lies in reframing IIAs not merely as instruments of investor protection but as potential vehicles for systemic correction, capable of moving transnational law towards equitable remedies.

This article examines how concentrated corporate power in the technology sector reshapes repression and human rights harm, arguing that an integrated Business and Human Rights (BHR) and Transitional Justice (TJ) approach is needed. It identifies three persistent gaps in BHR practice—regulatory fragmentation, limited access to remedy and Global North dominance—and demonstrates how TJ principles, particularly victim-centred participation, Global South leadership and transformative reparations, can address these challenges. Drawing on Latin American experiences with truth-seeking, reparations and corporate accountability, the article develops a hybrid BHR–TJ framework designed to confront power asymmetries, strengthen remedies and embed guarantees of non-repetition in global governance. The argument positions this integration as a forward-looking response to the structural harms of the digital economy, offering tools to move beyond proceduralism towards systemic corporate accountability. By combining BHR’s regulatory tools with TJ’s participatory and transformative approaches, the article contributes a novel accountability model for the digital era.

The global arms trade stands at the crossroads of security, business and human rights. While historically dominated by security narratives, increasing recognition of the arms industry’s business functions has led to calls for greater corporate accountability for the adverse human rights impacts of arms production and transfers. Business and Human Rights (BHR) provides innovative approaches for addressing regulatory and conceptual gaps in arms trade governance, and, in particular, offers two key paths forward for bringing coherency to arms trade governance and recalibrating the balance between security and business interests and human rights protection. First, as a field of practice, BHR can be utilised to develop comprehensive and coordinated due diligence that bridges silos between human rights, corruption, diversion and lack of transparency, to overcome regulatory fragmentation. Second, as a discourse, BHR introduces a conceptual foundation for reframing the status of human rights in arms trade governance and impelling corporate leadership to elevate human rights protection.

This study presents three key steps to enable the Business and Human Rights (BHR) research agenda to promote and advance greater applicability to the emerging challenges in the field. Drawing on research conducted on BHR sources (almost exclusively by Brazilian and Spanish-speaking authors), this article aims to demonstrate the need for further BHR scholarship to simultaneously: (i) identify and remedy epistemic biases through reflexive engagement with a victim-centred scholarship from the Global South that recentres BHR research on the perspective of affected communities; (ii) move from consideration to co-production by grounding BHR theory in practice via participatory methodologies and dialogue between communities, researchers and corporations; and (iii) by aligning with steps one and two, recontextualize Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) research into an integrated Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) approach that incorporates environmental and climate dimensions and ensure meaningful, victim-centred engagement with affected communities.