The Morocco-Nigeria BIT: An Important Contribution to Ensuring the Accountability of TNCs for their Human Rights Violations?

Corporate accountability for human rights violations has been at the forefront of the business and human rights debate. This debate has focused on the establishment of binding human rights obligations on corporate entities, particularly following the Human rights Council’s initiative to establish a treaty on business and human rights– a mandate given to the open-ended intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights. Joining this debate, this paper briefly comments on relevant provisions of the 2016 Morocco-Nigeria Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) which appears to contain innovative provisions that seek to ensure that investors (who are often corporate entities) are held accountable for their investment activities that adversely impact human rights within their host States. Although the Morocco-Nigeria BIT remains exceptional within the investment treaty framework, it reflects an initiative to ensure that the next generation of BITs encourages greater corporate accountability for their human rights violations

The Morocco-Nigeria BIT: An Important Contribution to Ensuring the Accountability of TNCs for their Human Rights Violations?

Corporate accountability for human rights violations has been at the forefront of the business and human rights debate. This debate has focused on the establishment of binding human rights obligations on corporate entities, particularly following the Human rights Council’s initiative to establish a treaty on business and human rights– a mandate given to the open-ended intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights. Joining this debate, this paper briefly comments on relevant provisions of the 2016 Morocco-Nigeria Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) which appears to contain innovative provisions that seek to ensure that investors (who are often corporate entities) are held accountable for their investment activities that adversely impact human rights within their host States. Although the Morocco-Nigeria BIT remains exceptional within the investment treaty framework, it reflects an initiative to ensure that the next generation of BITs encourages greater corporate accountability for their human rights violations

The Morocco-Nigeria BIT: An Important contribution to Ensuring the Accountability of TNCs for Their Human Rights Violations?

Corporate accountability for human rights violations has been at the forefront of the business and human rights debate. This debate has focused on the establishment of binding human rights obligations on corporate entities, particularly following the Human rights Council’s initiative to establish a treaty on business and human rights– a mandate given to the open-ended intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights. Joining this debate, this paper briefly comments on relevant provisions of the 2016 Morocco-Nigeria Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) which appears to contain innovative provisions that seek to ensure that investors (who are often corporate entities) are held accountable for their investment activities that adversely impact human rights within their host States. Although the Morocco-Nigeria BIT remains exceptional within the investment treaty framework, it reflects an initiative to ensure that the next generation of BITs encourages greater corporate accountability for their human rights violations

Corporate accountability for human rights violations:road to a binding instrument on business and human rights

The international community has awoken to the reality that large transnational corporations (TNCs) do not only control more resources than a good number of states. They wield enormous influence in the corporate world which greatly impacts on local cultures and initiatives. Many of these TNCs, who operate in developing states, engage in activities which frequently result in human rights abuses. Several states rely on the resources extracted by these large corporations as the main stay of their economies. Consequently, they lack the economic capacity and political will to effectively regulate the activities of the TNCs, leaving these entities to perpetrate human rights abuses in the local communities with impunity. Major international regulatory initiatives, such as the UN Guiding Principles, ILO declaration, and the OECD Guidelines have been adopted to fill in the regulatory gaps. As is analysed and detailed in this thesis, these initiatives have however proven ineffective. They have been criticized as being mere political commitments which lack the necessary legal binding force to ensure their implementation and enforcement. Following several calls from civil society, the Human Rights Council at its 26th session in July 2014, established an open-ended intergovernmental working group (OEIGWG) to elaborate on an international legally binding instrument on business and human rights to ensure that the activities of TNCs are effectively regulated. In July 2018, the OEIGWG published a zero draft of a legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises. The Zero Draft contains proposals for what could later be the provisions of the much-anticipated instrument that could fill in the regulatory gaps left by current business and human rights instruments and ensure corporate accountability for human rights abuse. Following an in-depth discussion on states’ obligations to protect against human rights violations committed by business enterprises, the main thrust of this thesis is to examine the proposals on the content, scope and implementation for the binding instrument as contained in the current zero draft. This will be done in order to determine whether it holds any potential for the improvement of the current human rights regulatory system in relation to the activities of transnational corporations

Jurisdiction - a barrier to compliance with extraterritorial obligations to protect against human rights abuses by non-state actors?

The obligation to protect individuals against human rights abuses by private and other ‘third’ parties is an accepted part of the tripartite human rights obligations’ classification. Ways of complying with this obligation are, however, not always clear, and some opposition has been voiced to it having reach beyond a state’s territorial border. This opposition is largely based on the reluctance of states to exercise their jurisdiction outside their territory. In this article, we address the content and reach of the human rights obligation to protect and how this relates to the exercise of jurisdiction to prevent human rights violations committed by private entities both within and beyond their home state’s territory. While the obligation to protect generally relates to the state’s obligation to regulate the conduct of any non-state actor, in this article we will use business enterprises as the actors in focus. The obligation to protect does not per se have a territorial limitation. The territorial limitation is brought in when the question of jurisdiction is added to the complexity. By addressing prescriptive jurisdiction, the article challenges the notion that jurisdiction in international human rights law is almost exclusively territorial, and argues that this is a misconception which results in many abuses of human rights that could have been addressed through regulation of conduct beyond a state’s border. Not tackling this misconception results in such conduct now being carried out with impunity. Consequently, the article argues that a restricted approach to jurisdiction is a barrier to full compliance with human rights obligation