Time to act: Securing a sustainable future through corporate accountability
As climate disruption, biodiversity loss, pollution, and toxic exposure continue to worsen and intensify globally, the international debate on the ecological and human rights obligations of business enterprises, especially of transnational corporations, is gaining renewed urgency.
In spite of an increasingly robust international human rights and environmental legal framework, when it comes to trade and investment agreements, transnational corporations are often granted rights that are stronger than local communities’ tenure and human rights, without including any corporate obligations, especially their obligations to respect and comply with remedies.
In the briefing paper “Time to Act: Securing a Sustainable Future through Corporate Accountability” FIAN and other organisations address the challenge to ensure that growing recognition of the RtHE across governance spaces is translated into enforceable and coherent obligations for states and corporations alike. The paper outlines how the UN legally binding instrument on transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights can contribute to close that gap with binding regulation of corporate conduct to prevent harm and secure access to justice and remedy in transnational contexts.
“The Treaty on TNCs and Human Rights can play a pivotal role in operationalizing states’ obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, for example by reinforcing meaningful participation, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and robust environmental, gender and human rights impact assessments” says Ayushi Kalyan, corporate accountability coordinator at FIAN International. ”Such provisions would enable and require States to take timely action to modify, suspend, halt or refrain from trade, investment, or concession agreements that threaten livelihoods, contaminate land and water, undermine biodiversity, or contribute to climate change.”
The paper highlights multiple examples how corporate operations are causing severe environmental pollution in water, air, and soil, damage to local agriculture, expropriation and displacement of communities, etc. It refers to recent developments in international jurisprudence which have clarified States’ duties to regulate private actors, enforce compliance, and ensure effective remedies – especially the Advisory Opinion (AO) of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the obligations of states in respect to climate change and the Advisory Opinion (AO) of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) on climate emergency and human rights.
It concludes with a set of recommendations
- to States:
-Constructively participate and strengthen the Updated Draft of the legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and human rights by ensuring that it establishes clear obligations for corporations and states, liability across jurisdictions, and effective remedies for affected communities;
-Integrate into domestic law stringent human rights due diligence, liability and other prevention mechanisms grounded in the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment
- to intergovernmental and UN bodies
-ensure that environmental policies genuinely reflect and serve the needs and priorities of those most impacted by environmental degradation and ensure coordination between human rights and environmental governance processes in line with the most progressive standards for protection.
- to civil society including trade unions
-Center the voices of grassroots communities and social movements as essential actors and promote community-led and people-centered solutions to the ecological crisis;
-Leverage the language of the legally binding instrument and jurisprudence on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in environmental justice advocacy, and share information about this instrument in relevant spaces.
For more information, please contact Sabine Pabst pabst@fian.org
