A BINDING TREATY ON BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Arguments can be found that the ever-growing power and influence of transnational corporations, which often greatly exceeds the resources and the capacities of many states, have repeatedly resulted with abuses of human rights and violations of basic principles of national and international law with unwilling and/or weak state governance to counter this. In June 2014, the UN Human Rights Council for the first time took formal steps to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights. This article acknowledges the utmost need to hold businesses accountable for human rights abuses and provides an overview on the meaning of a binding treaty on business and human rights from a legal, economic and policy perspective to test whether this approach strengthens the protection of human rights. The scope of the article is limited to exploring the feasibility of the idea of a binding treaty by providing a general overview of the discussion related to the status i.e. the legal subjectivity of corporations under international law, as well as to analysis of the applicability of international human rights law to corporations. This scrutiny with regards to the role of transnational corporations in the context of human rights shows that currently the matter stands in a way that any solution proposed from the perspective of international law appears as a futile approach from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions like the ones presented in Catch-22, the novel written by Joseph Heller. The article points out the shortcomings of a binding convention within the belief that rather than despair, this should lead us to organize better to ensure that the amorality of profit does not prevent the rise of the emerging need of a new human rights dialogue.