By Joy and Jo Banner of The Descendants Project in collaboration with Hay Sha Wiya of Seven Sisters Collective, and supported by Dominic Renfrey of The Center for Constitutional Rights – all members of the U.S. Treaty Alliance.

Corporate capture under the new US administration has reached a deeper low than ever before. Brazen corruption in the US is accompanied by the gutting of federal agencies that stand in the way of business interests. The Indigenous and formerly enslaved communities we descend from have witnessed firsthand the impact of this in our local communities, but we see the current developments as part of a much longer timeline marked by a countless series of local (and sometimes broader) battles between people’s right to determine their lives in the face of corporate desire for endless profit. It’s a story stretching back to the founding of the United States.

This week, the UN will convene a meeting of states involved in an intergovernmental process to develop a treaty on business and human rights. The focus will specifically be on provisions of the draft treaty that safeguard human rights from the impacts of undue corporate influence over government decision making – a phenomenon we call ‘corporate capture’. These safeguards are vital to the future survival and flourishing of our communities, and our advocacy is deeply grounded in our lived experience and those of our ancestors.

The Lakota and Dakota people of the Black Hills, which include one of the communities we represent, have borne witness to egregious violations of human rights at the hands of mining companies working in partnership with State authorities. The Lakota and Dakota people of Standing Rock that have fought Energy Transfer Partners, and the Anishinaabe Tribe that have fought Enbridge, can also attest first-hand to the oil companies’ privatisation of public militarised police against their struggle to have their treaty rights, land and water respected.

We are also witnesses to the violence corporate capture causes in another set of communities we represent, situated in an 80 mile stretch of land running alongside the lower Mississippi River. In the 1990s a council president of our area was sentenced to several years in prison for various corrupt activities in support of a toxic heavy industry company from Taiwan, called Formosa. He pushed into law a zoning ordinance that changed the classification of residential land to industrial land, which essentially invited heavy industry and its legacy of cancer and death into the heart of our Black communities. In 2021 we filed a lawsuit to rescind the ordinance but in the prior 25 years the parish used the corrupt plan as a basis to issue dozens of permits to toxic heavy industrial facilities, with apparent wilful blindness to the fatal consequences for our communities.

Individual fights like ours matter, but so do uniform mandatory legislative standards at all levels. This is why we advocate for a UN BindingTreaty that would obligate governments to put in place common sense measures to protect public decision making bodies from the undue influence of corporations.

Real world examples of how to do this are already in operation. Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control prevents tobacco companies from unduly influencing health policies, given their inherent conflict of interest. While it is an incomplete model, it illustrates a practical way corporate capture provisions in this draft treaty could be adapted to safeguard many areas of government policy and regulation. These protections could have far reaching positive human rights impacts in the areas of health and housing, as well as environmental, foreign and military policy, and much more. There’s clearly work to do to make this all fully operational, but political will is what’s most required now.

The worsening crackdown by the US Government and US corporations on marginalised and other communities of conscience does not bode well for the level or type of UN engagement that we can expect from the new administration. The Biden Administration brazenly attempted to undermine the negotiating process altogether, and in later years consistently and systematically proposed text that would weaken the treaty text in crucial ways. US Members of Congress, concerned by their actions, repeatedly wrote to the US State Department to push them to adjust their negotiating positions, but little changed. It is not clear whether US Government representatives will still be present in the UN treaty process. If they do not, perhaps it provides an opportunity for more engaged states to support the demands of communities like ours to safeguard key treaty provisions like Article 6.

It is clear that any failure to halt the myriad ways corporate capture violates our right to determine our futures will condemn us to more of the violence we experience while many corporations feed their insatiable greed for endless profits at our expense.