A Political Ecology of Injustice when Extracting Rights-holders from Nature: Analysis of the communications mechanism of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights

Abstract

In a world of interconnected global value chains, regulating the conduct of transnational corporations is challenging. In international human rights law, only voluntary mechanisms regulate the responsibility of businesses to respect. In the United Nations, the Guiding Principles of Business and Human Rights determine the international standards applicable: the duty of the State to protect, the corporate responsibility to respect, and the right of victims to remedy. The UN Human Rights Council established the Working Group on Business and Human Rights to guarantee the implementation of the Guiding Principles. This special procedure, composed of five independent experts, pushes forward the business and human rights agenda in the UN system. The Working Group receives information on abuses from civil society and sends letters to the States and companies involved to draw attention to the issue, ask for information, and remedy. This dissertation seeks to identify in those complaints patterns of conduct of the extractive industry that can reproduce environmental injustice and environmental human rights abuses. The extractive industry is the most frequently addressed sector in public allegations of abuses due to its impacts on local communities and the environment. As a nature-intensive sector, it offers an entry point to re-think environmental human rights from a political ecology perspective. The methodology includes a qualitative content analysis of 57 cases of alleged abuses of extractive companies from 2012-January 2023 in the complaint mechanism of the UN Working Group. Based on the Third World Approaches to International Law movement, this research questions whether human rights can challenge extractive neocolonial corporate practices. In the findings, the company´s notion of reputation and home States´ mere expectations are on the spot. At the same time, the claims of indigenous peoples and defenders are central to re-imagining environmental human rights in and from the sites of extraction.