The power of big business and the human rights protection vacuum

Clearly, the corporation’s sheer power not only presents a threat to the socio-economic and democratic wellbeing of societies but also brings about massive adverse impacts for human rights.  Their activities in international trade, finance, and investment have numerous implications for the observation and protection of human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights, and the solidarity rights of peoples. The perils of corporate power for people and for human rights are even bigger in Africa and other economically weak regions of the world...

[The] perils of corporate power [are] best portrayed in so colorful and dramatic terms in what the renowned African novelist Ngugi wa Thiogo calls corpolonialism. This is, as he noted in his famous novel the Wizard of the Crow, the incorporation of countries by powerful corporations and their transformation into corporate colony, corporonies. The upshot of this view is that in the African context the sheer scale of the economic, socio-cultural and political power of corporations creates huge imbalance in their relations with states skewing the balance firmly in favor and to the principal advantage of corporations and away from and to the determent disadvantage of the role and ability of the state to ensure protection of human rights...

In Africa, no where is the impact on human and peoples’ rights of, and the threat that the unaccountable power of corporations presents to, human rights is more pronounced than in the extractive industries. While the investment of extractive industries is increasingly seen as a vehicle for development, which is not entirely wrong, there is huge concern about the manner in which their activities affect peoples' access to and ownership of land, their rights to a healthy environment, and the conditions they are forced to work under...

As you set yourself to face this tremendous task and work towards promoting legal developments that fully remove the human rights protection vacuum that the nature of the operation of corporations have created, I call on you to collaborate with and support the work of the Working Group of the African Commission on Extractive Industries.