Fighting corporate power: time for a feminist treaty
Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
We are an international NGO that tracks the human rights impacts of over 10,000 companies in over 180 countries.
By Marya Farah, Marta Ribera and Sanyu Awori, Feminists for a Binding Treaty coalition
For 11 years, governments have gathered in Geneva to negotiate a binding treaty to hold transnational corporations accountable for human rights abuses. With the next round of talks set to begin on Monday against the backdrop of the climate crisis, conflicts and genocide, often driven or enabled by corporate interests, the urgency has never been greater.
What’s needed now is not just any treaty, but a feminist one: a treaty that dismantles corporate impunity, centers those most affected, and empowers them to claim their rights and obtain justice.
Connecting global struggles
As we have watched Israel’s genocide unfold, arms manufacturers, technology and surveillance companies have watched their profits rise. As underscored by the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory: “genocide is profitable.”
This violence is sustained by an infrastructure built to serve corporate power.
We have witnessed the genocide live-streamed on our mobile phones, made from minerals from contexts where other atrocities persist at the hands of technology and other companies.
Minerals sourced from countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo serve to fuel global trade and profits, including in tech equipment, while devastating local communities. Across the globe, from the Philippines and Madagascar to Argentina, this greedy, never-ending race for minerals is causing environmental destruction and the breach of Indigenous Peoples' rights.
Governments and corporations are pushing forward with mining expansion in the name of a “green transition”, but these discussions are happening without accountability for the destruction already caused by fossil fuel companies, and without any plan for a just transition that prioritises people over profit. This is not climate action, it is green colonialism – and it will continue to impact women’s access to land, clean water and agricultural and natural resources.
A feminist analysis requires we see these struggles not as separate crises, but as interlinked and part of the same paradigm we seek to dismantle.
Gendered costs of corporate abuses
Indeed, women and gender diverse people suffer from corporate abuses and experience multiple forms of discrimination. Rural and indigenous women face acute risks from food insecurity, climate change and corporate exploitation, while being systematically excluded from decision-making spaces that determine their futures. Economic inequality compounds these vulnerabilities: women's overrepresentation in informal work, lower wages and the burden of unpaid care work create a cycle that exposes them to violence and exploitation.
The climate crisis makes these injustices even more urgent. As corporations seize land and resources, women lose access to their homes and the resources their communities depend on. Women are both environmental defenders and key to building resilience within their communities, yet corporate abuse disproportionately impacts them alongside other groups disenfranchised by structural discrimination including queer communities, persons with disabilities, and Indigenous Peoples’ communities.
As members of Feminists for a Binding Treaty, we reaffirm our core demand: the treaty’s legal framework and drafting process must be rooted in the voices and leadership of women and gender diverse communities who are most affected by corporate abuses and too often excluded from the rooms where decisions are made. Their lived experiences and resistance are key to building a treaty that challenges the systems that enables systemic harm and delivers justice.
Treaty dynamics and corporate capture
As others have rightly said, the Binding Treaty process is at its core a “decolonial struggle,” and we remain alarmed by how imbalances in power have distorted the negotiations so far. Corporate interests from countries where the most powerful transnational corporations are based continue to actively participate in the sessions as UN-accredited organisations, often reinforcing positions that protect corporate interests. Meanwhile, women human rights defenders and impacted communities from the Majority World face financial, political, and structural barriers to participate in the sessions. Their voices remain underrepresented in Geneva, as in other multilateral spaces like the climate negotiations at COP. This is how corporate capture works to silence the people most affected while amplifying the very interests the treaty is meant to regulate.
Feminist visions for a just world
In the face of conflict and genocide profiteering, green colonialism and corporate capture of decision-making spaces, a binding feminist treaty is not just necessary: it is urgent.
Only through a framework that centers the rights and leadership of women, gender diverse people, Indigenous Peoples and affected communities can we challenge corporate impunity and build a future grounded in justice and accountability.
Marya Farah, Marta Ribera and Sanyu Awori are members of Feminists for a Binding Treaty, a coalition representing a large and diverse network of women and gender diverse people’s lived experiences, shared analysis and expertise from around the world in the process for a Binding Treaty.