Human Rights Issues Throughout the Value Chain of the Garment Sector

Supervisor/s: Manuel Couret Pereira Branco and Hermes Augusto Costa

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Contemporary societies have been marked by the rise of globalization, which brought vital actors to the global scenario, multinational corporations. Globalization also facilitates the flow of goods and services, encouraging enterprises to increasingly outsource part of their value chain processes to low-cost countries. This, however, imposes a high social cost to the business-as-usual model, most especially to people in the bottom of the pyramid, which are the most vulnerable ones in any productive chain. A set of business and human rights initiatives have been emerging in the last couple of years, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), as an attempt to encourage corporate best practices. The question that remains is how effective such instruments are as most of them lacks law-enforcement. With that in mind, this research project aims to investigate how corporations have been implementing their responsibility to respect human rights when it comes to providing access to remedy, as stated at the third pillar of the UNGPs. Taking into consideration that the garment sector ranks amongst the most critical ones in the productive system, the main investigation focus of this project is going to be the workers at the initial-end of this particular industry as they represent the most vulnerable stakeholders in such chain, hence more subjected to human rights violations, thus to the need of redress.