No Profit Without Accountability: For People and the Planet

The world continues to face the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, all of them interconnected. These crises are often driven by harmful corporate activities — such as extractive industries, fossil fuel production, and large-scale agribusiness — that degrade ecosystems, erode livelihoods, and undermine the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (RtHE) alongside other interconnected human rights, including the rights to life, health, food, and water.

Communities and defenders have long raised their voices about these impacts.  Yet, too often, corporations escape accountability while communities are left without remedy or justice, as outlined in a new study focusing on environmental issues — No Profit Without Accountability: For People and the Planet — aimed at shaping UN discussions for a Legally Binding Instrument (LBI) to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other businesses enterprises with respect to Human Rights.

The LBI, negotiated in the UN Human Rights Council by the Open-ended intergovernmental working group (OEIGWG), represents a historic opportunity to close this accountability gap and ensure business can no longer act with impunity. Yet, despite strong support from many states, references to environmental rights were recently removed from the Updated Draft of the LBI. Recent legal and policy developments — including the Advisory Opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights — confirm that states already have obligations to protect the RtHE and to regulate corporate actors that contribute to environmental harm. This growing body of international law underscores the importance of explicitly integrating environmental rights in the LBI text.

The upcoming session of the Human Rights Council’s open-ended intergovernmental working group in October 2025 – the eleventh annual round of discussions – has enormous potential for curbing excessive corporate power and protecting communities and the environment. States will be negotiating the final articles of a legally binding instrument (LBI) to regulate transnational corporations in international human rights law. FIAN, the author of the study, together with many other international civil society organisations insist that the LBI must include an explicit recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment and integrate this right – along with broader environmental and climate change considerations – throughout its substantive provisions. 

Enforceable international standards

Communities and human rights and environmental defenders have long campaigned for this addition to international human rights law.

In Latin America, families are still fighting for justice decades after Sweden’s Boliden Mineral dumped toxic waste in Arica, Chile, causing widespread health problems for people living near the dump site. In Palestine, corporations like Heidelberg Materials are alleged to have contributed to the pillaging of natural resources from occupied land. Across Africa and Asia, extractive projects are dispossessing Indigenous Peoples and rural communities of their territories and food systems. Each case highlights the urgent need for clear, enforceable international standards that prioritize human rights and environmental protection over corporate profit.

The International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have both affirmed states’ obligations to regulate private actors and prevent transboundary environmental harm. More than 80 percent of UN member states already legally recognize the right to a healthy environment. 

Close the gap

Negotiators now have the responsibility to close the gap at the global level by embedding this right in the heart of the LBI.

The study offers concrete legal textual proposals to states to strengthen the provisions in the LBI — ensuring, among other things, that it includes environmental due diligence, precautionary measures, and the primacy of human rights and environmental obligations over trade and investment agreements. States should carefully consider and integrate these recommendations in their submissions during the next round of negotiations in October 2025 and continue leveraging these proposals in their ongoing advocacy in relevant national, regional and international spaces and processes. 

As the world edges closer to climate collapse, this LBI process is a critical opportunity to hold corporations accountable.