Twelve years into negotiations, decisions on corporate obligations, liability, scope, jurisdiction, and enforcement will determine whether the treaty strengthens the international legal framework for corporate accountability or leaves significant gaps unresolved.
ESCR-Net’s new legal brief, “Corporations Operate Globally. Accountability Must Too,” focuses on three legal elements that could help build a coherent chain from obligation and prevention to liability and effective remedy across borders.
1. Establish corporate obligations and effective liability
The treaty should establish direct obligations on businesses, linked to prevention, liability and remedy, particularly in relation to grave violations. Corporate liability must reflect how transnational corporations actually operate across borders and through complex corporate structures, ensuring that parent companies and other entities cannot escape liability for harm connected to subsidiaries, contractors, suppliers, joint ventures or other business relationships.
2. Ensure the treaty captures transnational corporate power
The scope of the treaty must capture the realities of transnational corporate power. Transnationality is not simply a question of where a corporation is incorporated, but where corporate power is exercised, decisions are made, control is located and human rights impacts are experienced.
The brief examines contemporary forms of corporate power through capitalist extractivism and techno-colonialism, including extractive industries, financial institutions, digital platforms, AI companies, cloud providers, data brokers and surveillance technology companies.
Technology may change how violations and abuses occur, but it should not change corporate human rights obligations.
3. Strengthen jurisdiction and create a pathway toward an international tribunal
Accountability must also operate across borders. The brief calls for stronger extraterritorial jurisdiction, limits on forum non conveniens, recognition of forum necessitatis, and the reintroduction of universal jurisdiction for human rights violations that amount to international crimes.
It also proposes a pathway toward an international judicial mechanism, operating on the principle of complementarity, to provide a safety net where domestic systems are unable or unwilling to provide timely and effective justice.
Ultimately, transnational business activities must entail transnational legal accountability.
