"Negotiations for a Legally Binding Treaty on Transnational Companies. What is at stake this month?", 17 Oct 2023

The 9th session of the UN Human Rights Council open-ended intergovernmental working group (OEIGWG) on transnational corporations (TNCs) and other business enterprises with respect to human rights will be held in the Palais des Nations Geneva from 23 to 27 October, 2023...

[H]owever there are no mandatory obligations for TNCs at the global level. Only national and regional level law applies to them, which is often insufficient to hold them accountable for human rights violations. This creates regulatory gaps and loopholes that many TNCs use to avoid criminal prosecution for their involvement in human rights violations, environmental crimes, or tax evasion. This is even more daunting for countries in the Global South...

Ecuador has been the Chair of the OEIGWG since the process started... In the last years the role of Ecuador as Chair of this process has received mounting criticism from civil society groups, social movements and a number of states because of the consolidated texts for negotiations are considered too biased towards the proposals made by the interest of the TNCs...

Many countries from the Global South (from the African, South East Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean regions) have most consistently supported an ambitious international legally binding instrument, one that focuses on establishing legal liability mechanisms on TNCs and on ensuring access to justice and remedy to affected peoples...

The countries who have not engaged or directly reject and have tried to stop the process are the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, as well as other highly industrialized countries with a high number of TNCs headquartered in their territories.

The European Union and its member states have shifted their stance across the years. From an initial position of non-engagement and rejection, to providing some inputs, such as in the case of France. However, the role of the EU as a whole has been also heavily criticized by European CSOs for its lack of engagement, and often its ambiguity about the need for obligations for TNCs...

What is new this year?

• For the first time, there has been national and regional consultations between the session in Geneva, in particular Africa and Latin America, reflecting the growing importance of this process...
• We can expect the strongest ever interventions in the process by African countries like Namibia, Egypt, South Africa and others. We might witness a coordinated participation by the African Union (representing all 54 African states). In 2022 the African union issued a joint statement during the first day of negations to reiterate the need to focus on TNCs and not all business.
• We can expect also a strong role by the Palestinian delegation, as was the case in 2022...