treaty-negotiation advocacy, not a shareholder resolution · 2024
Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples' Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity at Corporate lobbies at the UN Intergovernmental Working Group on transnational corporations and human rights; no individual company named
Keep the proposed UN legally binding instrument focused on transnational corporations and the enterprises in their value chains, resisting the corporate push to widen its scope to all business enterprises, which the campaign argues would let transnational corporations deflect responsibility and escape cross-border liability.
What happened
Result: The Global Campaign published a paper on 13 December 2024, around the tenth session of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group, arguing that widening the instrument to all businesses, including state-run enterprises with no transnational character, would severely undermine it. The paper reads Human Rights Council Resolution 26/9 against the corporate reading: its phrase 'other business enterprises' is defined in a footnote as enterprises with a transnational character, which excludes businesses operating only within national borders.
The treaty is still under negotiation and nothing we opened shows this push changing its text. Reporting from the same tenth session describes the negotiations advancing despite the presence of corporate lobbies, with states working through the articles on prevention, remedy, legal liability, jurisdiction, limitation and applicable law and closing the session by adopting the draft report and recommendations by consensus.
What this campaign is about
- Entitlement to a social and international order in which these rights can be fully realized Helpful · Universal Declaration of Human Rights