One year ago, a remarkable diplomatic consensus that had lasted the better part of a decade was seemingly shattered when the Human Rights Council passed two separate resolutions on business and human rights: one was focused on the continued work of implementing the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs) while the other established an Open Ended Intergovernmental Working Group (OEIWG) ‘to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises’.

At the time, I warned activists that the immediate risk of a treaty process was not so much a diversion from the GPs, or even a treaty (that will be many years in coming and will require reconstructing the diplomatic consensus). Rather, the greatest risk lay in the effects of a treaty process on civil society attempts to hold business accountable for human rights abuse. My fear was that a protracted treaty process would sink civil society energies into the swamp of member state negotiation of a treaty text in Geneva, diverting those energies from their proper target: pressing governments to take action to prevent and remedy human rights violations by business.