The Annual Kleh Lecture: featuring Professor Enrique Prieto-Ríos
Monday, November 17th, 2025
12:45 – 2:00pm
Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02215
Barristers Hall, First Floor
Please join us for the Annual Kleh Lecture on Monday, November 17th. Professor Enrique Prieto-Ríos will discuss “UNGPs in Turbulent Times: Systemic Violence and Global Inequality.”
Fifteen years after the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), their promise to rein in corporate abuses remains deeply contested, particularly in contexts marked by armed conflict and structural inequality. While the UNGPs established a shared vocabulary of responsibility among states, corporations, and civil society, their real-world impact in settings shaped by violence and colonial legacies has been limited. This lecture revisits the evolution of the business and human rights agenda, from early attempts to regulate transnational corporations to the recent proliferation of due diligence legislation, and interrogates how the UNGPs both reflect and obscure deeper patterns of global power.
Using Colombia as a case study marked by seven decades of internal conflict and a significant corporate presence in extractive sectors, the lecture examines the limits of the UNGPs in environments where violence is both systemic and overtly armed. Although the UNGPs call for proportionality and contextual sensitivity, their voluntary design, standardized methodologies, and Global North assumptions often fail to account for informality, institutional fragility, and the complex entanglement between business activity and local manifestations of violence.
In such contexts, multinational corporations may not directly engage in violence yet can nonetheless reinforce or benefit from it, through land acquisition in contested territories, reliance on private security, or tacit arrangements that guarantee operational continuity. The recent 2024 U.S. federal jury verdict against Chiquita Brands International, which held the company liable for financing the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary organization responsible for widespread atrocities, offers a striking illustration. The case illustrates how corporate decisions, framed as risk management, can, in practice, perpetuate systems of terror and displacement, underscoring the inadequacy of voluntary due diligence mechanisms in preventing or remedying harm.
Ultimately, the lecture calls for renewed critical reflection on the relationship between human rights, business, and international law. It invites a reconsideration of the UNGPs not as neutral instruments but as products of a governance architecture shaped by enduring power asymmetries. In doing so, it argues for the need to envision binding, contextually grounded frameworks capable of addressing not only corporate responsibility but also the structural and historical roots of violence and inequality.
About the Speaker
Enrique Alberto Prieto-Ríos holds a PhD in Law from Birkbeck, University of London (2017), an MA in International Law from University College London (2008), and an LLB from Universidad del Rosario (2007). Dr. Prieto-Ríos is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Universidad del Rosario and the Chief Editor of Estudios Socio-Jurídicos, an esteemed academic journal. He has previously served as Research Director of the Faculty of Law and Head of the Research Group on International Law at Universidad del Rosario.
His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming with publishers and journals such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer, Leiden Journal of International Law, Business and Human Rights Journal, Law and Critique, and Cambridge University Press edited volumes, among others. His work explores intersections of international economic law, human rights, global value chains, and decolonial/transformative constitutionalist approaches. He has contributed chapters to collective volumes like The Oxford Handbook of International Law and the Americas and the Cambridge Handbook on Investment Law and Human Rights, and is co-editor of forthcoming volumes on critical approaches to international law and corporate accountability.
Dr. Prieto-Ríos has been a visiting research fellow at prestigious institutions such as the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and the School of Law at the University of Warwick. He has also lectured at Universidad de los Andes and served as a sessional lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.
His expertise extends to policy and legal consultancy, having advised the Presidential Counsellor for Human Rights and Foreign Affairs on Colombia’s third National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights. He has provided strategic human rights guidance to the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defense and has worked with organizations such as Panagora Group (on USAID programs for the protection of human rights defenders) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on International Humanitarian Law practices in Colombia.
Since 2019, Dr. Prieto-Ríos has served as a Commissioner on Colombia’s Advisory Commission on Peace and Human Rights, a body established under the 2016 Peace Accord. His previous roles also include clerking at the Colombian Constitutional Court and directing the British and Colombian Lawyers Association (BRICOL), further highlighting his commitment to advancing human rights, international law, and peacebuilding efforts in Colombia.
Established in 2011 as part of the William & Patricia Kleh Visiting Professorship. The Kleh lecture is delivered by the Kleh Visiting Professor, who teaches one or more courses during their semester visiting BU Law. The Professorship and Lecture is made possibly by the generosity of William Kleh (’71) and his wife Patty.
Boston University strives to be accessible, inclusive and diverse in our facilities, programming and academic offerings. Your experience in this event is important to us. If you have a disability (including but not limited to learning or attention, mental health, concussion, vision, mobility, hearing, physical or other health related), require communication access services for the deaf or hard of hearing, or believe that you require a reasonable accommodation for another reason please contact Elizabeth Clancey (lawevent@bu.edu) by March 25th, to discuss your needs.
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