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While the Second Pillar Corporate responsibility to Respect human rights is the most innovative and potentially more transformative of the three pillar framework, the First Pillar State duty to protect human rights provides the foundational legal basis within the domestic legal orders of states for the vindication of international human rights norms. I have briefly suggested the relationship between pillars.  Larry Catá Backer,  Business and Human Rights Part II--Thoughts on the Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights, Law at the End of the Day, Feb. 2, 2010.  In discussion of the First Pillar obligations of states, the SRSG has focused on the legal obligations oof state sderuved from international law.  See Special Representative of the Secretary General on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises, Business and Human Rights:  Toward Operationalizing the "Protect, Respect, Remedy" Framework, Summary, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/11/13 (April 12, 2009).  The duty to protect is grounded in international human rights law (id., at par. 13).  It does not derive directly from national law, including the constitutional traditions of the state, except to the extent that such national constitutional traditions are compatible with international norms.   International law, in turn, includes two sets of obligations through treaty: (1) to refrain from violating a set of enumerated rights of persons within the national territory, and (2) to ensure the enjoyment of such rights by rights holders.  (Id.). 

These duties have a vertical and horizontal dimension.  They apply vertically to govern the relations between states and others within the national territory.  And  they apply horizontally to apply to manage the relations among non-.state actors within the territory of the state.   (Id.).  While the vertical dimensions are well understood in international law--the horizontal dimension represents something that is newer.  Even within the bounds of European law, for example, in the construciton of the jurisprudence of "direct effects" of EU directives, the European Court of Justice had resisted for a long time the extension of the vertical effects of the doctrine to include horizontal relations between non-state actors.  

This analogy is important  within the conceptual framework of the duty to protect.  The SRSG emphasizes the vertical elements of  the transposition of international obligations to regulate the conduct of enterprises.  "That is, States are not held responsible for corporate related human rights abuses per se, but may be considered in breach of their obligations where they fail to take appropriate steps to prevent it and to investigate, punish, and redress it when it occurs." Id., para. 14.  Thus understood, international law, to the extent it speaks to rules covering the behavior of corporate conduct, might appear to serve the same purpose as directives within the European Union governance system.  "Within these parameters, States have discretion as to how to fulfill their duty."  Id. 

The SRSG has noted two important issues relating to the State duty to protect.  the first touches on the obligation of state sot project their laws outside their territories and onto the effects of home state entities in host states. (Id., 15-16) The second looks to the nature of the internal transposition of international obligations--understood in terms of vertical and horizontal incoherence.   (Id., para. 17-19).  The SRSG suggests that the problems of extraterritoriality and legal incoherence has been ameliorated by the internationalization of law--effectively harmonizing legal obligations and thus reducing the effect of projections of national power abroad (since all law id effectively similar in effect) (Id., para. 20), andthrough the harmonizing effects of soft law regimes (Id., at 21). 

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