Closing the Gaps, Defending Life: A Binding Treaty for Climate Justice

In the first part of this series, we highlighted the urgent need for a strong UN Binding Treaty on transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights and the central role of affected communities in leading the struggle for climate justice. As the 11th session of negotiations for the Binding Treaty near, and in the lead up to the Peoples’ Summit and COP30 climate negotiations in November, we expand our analysis to consider the vast legal gaps allowing corporations to evade accountability and the grassroots resistance critical to closing them.

International trade and investment agreements today provide TNCs with extraordinary rights and protections. Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanisms grant corporations the power to sue governments in shady tribunals whenever public policies threaten their profits, be it banning toxic pesticides or cancelling fossil fuel projects. These tribunals consistently prioritise corporate profits over human rights, environmental protection and democratic decision-making. 

On the other hand, international human rights law has no equivalent enforcement mechanism when communities suffer harm. Communities affected by oil spills, forced displacement, poisoned water supplies and climate-related disasters rarely find meaningful remedies against the corporate giants at fault. Due to the absence of this mechanism and the transnational character of TNCs, domestic courts are often undermined by corporate lobbying or a lack of jurisdiction when these violations cross borders. This results in a gaping asymmetry. Corporations enjoy global enforceable rights while communities are left with fragmented, weak or inaccessible avenues for justice.  

The Binding Treaty, however, seeks to close this chasm by establishing legally binding obligations for corporations under international human rights law. It would create tools for cross-border accountability. It would ensure that no transnational corporation can hide behind complex webs of subsidiaries or exploit jurisdictional loopholes. This is critical for climate justice. Fossil fuel companies, mining giants, agribusiness and financiers cannot continue to profit from environmental destruction while offloading the costs onto communities and the planet.

It is these same communities at the heart of the Binding Treaty

Leading the struggle against this architecture of impunity are the communities on the frontlines of a system that continues to put profit over people. Their resistance and demands for survival, dignity and justice are a reminder that the treaty’s true power lies in the people it is meant to serve.

“For those on the frontlines, climate justice is inseparable from the right to life, land, food and water, to health and to self-determination. Communities facing corporate violence know firsthand how the global economic order strips them of their rights for the sake of corporate profit.”

– Letícia Paranhos, Friends of the Earth International

Lessons from the 9th Maputo Workshop: Building people power

This truth was vividly present at the 9th Maputo Workshop on Corporate Impunity and Human Rights, a panafricanist gathering hosted in July 2025 by Justiça Ambiental (JA!) / FoE Mozambique, with the participation of the Friends of the Earth International, the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples’ Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity, allies, movements and affected communities. The workshop gathered hundreds of frontline defenders, grassroots organisations and movements to share lived experiences of corporate violations and find commonality across struggles, putting forward a path toward system change in times of crises. 

In Maputo, fisherfolk, smallholder farmers and members of affected communities from across the African continent described how extractive projects have devastated livelihoods, polluted ecosystems and displaced peoples. They exposed how corporations silence resistance and demand compensation from states that dare to regulate them. Their stories illustrated the painful costs of corporate power and the architecture of impunity that props it up.

But the Maputo Workshop was also a space of resilience and vision. Participants shared strategies of resistance: legal challenges against megaprojects, mobilisations to defend land and water, learnings from historic movements, demonstrations of internationalist solidarity and the building of community-led alternatives rooted in food sovereignty and real solutions to the climate crisis.

“Communities are not waiting for UN negotiations in Geneva to act. They are actively struggling for justice against corporate power, and it is the Binding Treaty that needs to reflect this reality and be accountable to those lives and livelihoods being attacked on the ground.” 

– Anabela Lemos, JA! Director / FoE Mozambique

The Binding Treaty must be an instrument forged with and for the peoples most affected by corporate violence.

Towards climate justice

As negotiations for the Binding Treaty enter a decisive phase, two paths lie ahead. One is the continuation of the status quo as corporate lobbies dilute the treaty into voluntary guidelines, while ISDS tribunals continue to punish states for holding TNCs accountable, and communities suffer. The other path is a rupture, a Binding Treaty that closes the loopholes in international law, establishes enforceable regulations on TNCs and makes a significant and much-needed step forward towards giving communities access to justice across borders.

This struggle in Geneva is inseparable from the struggles across Mozambique, in the Amazon, in the Niger Delta, Palestine and Indonesia, and in countless other sites of resistance. Climate justice cannot be achieved while corporate impunity reigns.

As the Peoples’ Summit and COP30 in Belém, Brazil, approach, the voices of affected communities and from the Maputo Workshop remind us of what is at stake. Climate justice means ending the architecture of impunity, dismantling corporate power and centring the leadership of those most affected. It means making corporations accountable not to shareholders’ profits but to peoples’ rights and the environment.