Zeitschrift für Zivil- und Rechtswissenschaften

Abstrakt

Framing Human Rights and the Production of Translation Legal Consciousness

Keren Wang

This paper presents a case study on a complaint document filed by the British NGO “Survival International” against the multinational mining conglomerate Vedanta Resources for alleged human rights violations. By examining the internal and external dynamics of the text of the complaint document, this paper seeks to delineate the strategic framing of rights violations by Survival International within the context of international legal discourse. The document operates beyond the contours of international legal formalism. The complaint document functions as a polycentric legal document, as it seeks to bridge the gap between “hard” and “soft” international legal structures through the invocation of multiple discrete norm systems in a unified fashion. Most importantly, by bringing together civil-political and socioeconomic rights into a singular, indivisible human rights narrative frame, the documents serves as an example of the ways which non-state actors utilize the discursive dynamics of the polycentric global norm structures for disciplining corporate social responsibility.