Time to Act: Securing a Sustainable Future Through Corporate Accountability

As environmental crises intensify worldwide, the urgency for enforceable global rules on corporate accountability has never been greater. Large-scale extractive and industrial activities continue to destroy ecosystems and undermine the conditions necessary for life, violating the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (RtHE) as well as related rights such as life, health, food, and water. Communities affected by these harms often lack effective protection, remedies, or avenues to hold corporations accountable.

In recent decades, the international community has increasingly recognized that environmental protection is inseparable from human rights. The UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council have affirmed the RtHE, and international jurisprudence increasingly frames environmental degradation as a systemic human rights harm.

Yet corporations remain among the principal drivers of ecological destruction, and significant gaps persist between normative recognition and enforceable regulation of corporate conduct. The existing frameworks for corporate regulation are often voluntary, fragmented, or weakly enforced. To address these shortcomings, the UN Human Rights Council established an Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group (OEIGWG) in 2014 to negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument (LBI or UN Treaty on Business and Human Rights) on transnational corporations and other business enterprises. Now in its twelfth year, the process is the only UN forum dedicated to creating binding standards for corporate accountability, navigating tensions between the progressive demands of many Global South states and civil society, and resistance from some industrialized countries and corporate actors.

The goal of this study is to highlight the LBI as a key structural lever for advancing environmental justice and supporting a just transition. It explores how stronger legal frameworks can improve corporate accountability for environmental harm and human rights violations, and how enforceable obligations can better protect both people and the planet. By analyzing the role of the LBI within broader governance debates, the study also highlights pathways to strengthen enforceability and accountability in practice. It concludes with a set of recommendations aimed at supporting states, civil society, as well as intergovernmental and UN bodies.

The study was developed by FIAN International (with contributions by the Center for International Environmental Law, Franciscans International, the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Service for Human Rights) with the support of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Geneva Office. It is a follow-up study to the environmental analysis on the LBI published in November 2025.