Law Professor at Valencia University, Adoración Guaman, considered that the “Zero Draft” of the binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights, under negotiation at the UN “turns its back on three years of negotiations and it fails to respect the spirit of resolution 26/9”, which gave way to these international negotiations.

“The Draft has thrown out the main red lines of the process, ones that were only criticized by businesses. The Draft fails to reflect the extensively developed consensus”, said Guaman in an interview with Real World Radio.

The binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights violations is being negotiated by an open-ended Working Group at the United Nations Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, Switzerland. The WG was created by resolution 26/9 in 2014. So far, there were three rounds of official negotiations (2015, 2016 and 2017) towards the development of this binding treaty to make transnational corporations respect human rights and to punish them when they fail to do so.

The “Zero Draft” was presented by the Ecuadorian Chair of the Working Group ahead of the fourth round of negotiations to take place in October this year. Guaman welcomed the publication of the draft as a sign of the progression of this process, but strongly criticized its flaws in terms of how it was formulated and its contents.