22 Abuse by State-owned enterprises, that is to say, where the State controls the enterprise or where the enterprise’s acts can otherwise be attributed to the State, may constitute a violation of the State’s own international law obligations.8 If States own or control business enterprises, they have the greatest means within their powers to ensure that relevant policies, legislation and regulations regarding respect for human rights are implemented. Senior management typically reports to State agencies, and associated government departments have greater scope for scrutiny and oversight, including ensuring that effective human rights due diligence is implemented. The legal obligations of the State to respect and protect human rights are additional to the enterprise’s own responsibility to respect human rights and do not diminish it in any regard. For joint ventures with significant human rights risks, it is particularly important to ensure that the legal and other agreements underpinning the ventures provide the necessary basis to ensure that human rights are respected in their operations. Q 17. How is an enterprise’s structure relevant to its responsibility to respect human rights? Business enterprises can have various structures. For instance, some are wholly separate—legally and functionally—from any other enterprise; others follow a franchise model with greater or lesser degrees of contractual constraint on franchisees; others are part of cooperatives or create a holding company to link a group of enterprises. Some others operate as a parent company and subsidiaries, with varying degrees of control exercised by the parent company and correspondingly varied levels of devolved authority to the subsidiaries. The corporate group structure does not make any difference to whether entities within the group have to respect human rights. It simply affects how they go about ensuring that rights are respected in practice, for instance through their contractual arrangements, internal management systems, governance or accountability structures. If human rights abuses occur, it will be the national law in the relevant jurisdiction that determines where liability rests. See the State duty to protect human rights, in particular Guiding Principle 4, not covered in this publication. 8