This week in Geneva, the UN is hosting the 12th session of negotiations on the Binding Treaty, a future treaty on business and human rights. States, civil society organisations and social movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America are taking part, alongside parliamentarians from the Global Interparliamentary Network (GIN), including MEPs from The Left. What is at stake is who holds power, and who can demand justice when that power causes harm.

Martin Günther summed it up clearly: “When corporate power crosses borders, accountability must follow it.” Europe must turn its human rights commitments into legal obligations. Rudi Kennes called on the EU to “uphold the primacy of human rights over economic interests.”

But what exactly is the Binding Treaty? In simple terms, it seeks to create binding international rules to ensure that transnational corporations are held accountable for human rights violations they cause or contribute to. Today, a multinational company can operate across several countries and hide responsibility behind borders, subsidiaries and legal gaps. This is the architecture of transnational corporate impunity that the Treaty can help dismantle.
For decades, Indigenous Peoples, Black communities, peasants and workers have suffered pollution, displacement and the destruction of their territories, while major corporations have continued to accumulate profits and escape justice. In the middle of the energy transition, we cannot repeat the same model. Lithium, copper, nickel or cobalt should not become the new coal and oil if their extraction moves forward without free, prior and informed consent, without respecting the decisions of communities, and without accountability and justice when rights are violated. Changing the energy source without dismantling impunity would leave the same system of injustice intact.

And today, this does not concern only communities in the Global South; it concerns society worldwide. Big Tech is concentrating increasing power over our data, our privacy and the infrastructure on which we depend. Companies such as Palantir show how private technologies are entering policing, border control and other public institutions; when something goes wrong, states and companies can shift responsibility back and forth until it disappears.
That is why Günther stressed: “No corporation, whether it extracts resources from our territories or data from our lives, should ever be beyond the reach of human rights and the law.” Kennes also warned the EU: “Stop listening to the sweet lies corporate lobbies are whispering in your ears.”

For left-wing forces, supporting this Treaty means challenging the power of major corporations and putting human rights above their interests. Civil society, trade unions, social movements and affected communities will need to pressure their governments to sign, ratify and implement it.

The Binding Treaty is a historic opportunity to end an era in which corporations cross borders while justice is left behind; to transform decades of struggle into binding rights, prevent new sacrifice zones, and make corporate power answer to the people whose lives it affects.

Juan Pablo Gutierrez is a member of the Yukpa Indigenous People of Colombia, whose ancestral territory has been affected by the extractive activities of transnational corporations. He is a political advisor to MEP Martin Günther, responsible for relations with social movements from the Global South.