Public Procurement, International Labour Law and Free Movement in EU Law: Protect, Respect and Remedy

In this paper, I discuss the interaction of international labour law and European Union (EU) law on fundamental rights and free movement in regard to public procurement in the light of the Report1 of the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) on Human Rights and Business. In the Report of the SRSG the author states: The root cause of the business and human rights predicament today lies in the governance gaps created by globalization — between the scope and impact of economic forces and actors, and the capacity of societies to manage their adverse consequences. These governance gaps provide the permissive environment for wrongful acts by companies of all kinds without adequate sanctioning or reparation. How to narrow and ultimately bridge the gaps in relation to human rights is our fundamental challenge. The challenge of how to narrow the gaps between economic forces and human rights is, in an EU context, mainly dealt with within the framework of binding legal provisions, in particular the provisions on free movement of services and freedom of establishment that mainly accommodate economic business interests and the equally binding provisions on fundamental rights that also accommodate a number of social rights that may be more or less contrary to the economic interests of business. The social model EU law is based on is often called ‘a social market economy’.2