How Can I Enforce My Rights?

This Guide will now outline the different ways you can enforce your rights and hold businesses accountable when they abuse your rights.

These options include:

1. Bringing civil claims against businesses in national courts
2. Bringing civil claims against businesses in foreign courts
3. Bringing criminal prosecutions against businesses and individuals
4. Bringing claims against governments for not regulating businesses
5. Making complaints to internal corporate grievance mechanisms
6. Making complaints to international corporate accountability mechanisms
7. Alternative dispute resolution (e.g. negotiations and mediation)

The questions below are here to help you see your options for enforcing your rights.

How to Use the Business & Human Rights Checklist

(1) Read each question on the left of the table.

(2) Think about which of the answers in the middle column of the table are right for your case.

(2) Highlight each of possible mechanisms on the right of the table that relate to answer you have chosen.

(3) Once you have reached the end of the series of questions, see if there are any mechanisms that have been highlighted for all 3 questions. These are the mechanisms that are likely most useful for you to consider using.

(4) Read the sections of this Guide that relate to those mechanisms.

All claims cost money. Bringing a legal claim can be an expensive and time-consuming process. This can be especially difficult when bringing claims against businesses that have much more money than you.

BUT, there are ways to help finance your claim, including legal aid, pooling together resources in a group claim or getting support from an organisation.

• We recommend that you read our webpage “How Can I Finance My Action?”.