020 7650 1200

International Field Worker

Joint report submitted to UN Economic, Social and Cultural Rights committee to urge UK to meet its obligation to promote and respect the natural resource rights of all people

A joint report has been submitted to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) calling on it to urge the UK government to protect and promote the natural resource rights of people around the world.

Posted on 13 January 2025

The joint report is a collaboration between the Transnational Law Institute of King’s College London, Leigh Day, and NGOs Raid, and Clean Trade. 

The report recommends that the CESCR urges the UK government to take specific measures, particularly in relation to multinational parent companies within its jurisdiction, to protect the rights of people over natural resources. 

The CESCR is a UN committee that that monitors the implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by countries around the world.

The CESCR aims to work with state parties to see how the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are being applied, and how the application of the covenant could be improved.

The covenant looks to maintain rights such as the right to ‘adequate food, adequate housing, education, health, social security, water and sanitation, and work. It also stipulates that all people have the right to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources and that they should not be deprived of their own means of subsistence. With regard to indigenous peoples, the CESCR committee has recognised that these natural resource rights are critical to the right to self-determination.

The report notes that ‘abuses of resource rights, particularly of indigenous peoples, are rising across the globe’ and are often closely associated with human rights abuses arising from multinational operations.

The report highlights six key recommendations for the committee:

  1. To robustly affirm the natural resource rights of all peoples: both the rights of indigenous peoples and of national peoples.
  2. To urge the UK government not to waver in its commitment to fully respect resource rights, and to resist the pressures to adopt policies that are detrimental to these rights.
  3. To urge the UK government to pass robust legislation and regulations imposing due diligence duties on its transnational corporations to prevent abuses of the right to natural resources and other human rights.
  4. To urge the UK government to pass legislation to impose clear duties and sanctions on regulatory and certification bodies to prevent them from enabling environmental harm and human rights abuses from taking place abroad.
  5. To urge the UK government to support all these progressive reforms to the current system of investment arbitration. These treaties provide protections to investors. They are based on public international law and are immune to legislative changes in the state where the investment was made.
  6. To urge the UK government to support the international efforts aimed at a binding treaty to give stronger effect to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

The report concludes that the resource rights of people are currently under ‘significant pressure’ from entities based in the UK, and that it is a ‘crucial moment’ for the CESCR to affirm the resource rights for all people: both indigenous and national people who are citizens of an independent state. The report states that the protection of resource rights has ‘never been more critical’.

International partner Richard Meeran said:

“Abuses of resource rights are rising across the globe and are often closely linked to multinational operations and supply chains enforcement of laws and regulations, and access to justice, in states where resources are extracted, is often poor. It is therefore vital that the conduct of multinationals is effectively regulated by the home states in which they are based, and which benefit from the resources, and that these corporations are held to account, legally, when such abuses occur. Measures by the UK government that give practical effect to the UK’s obligations, under the covenant and other international standards, are vital to achieving these objectives.” 

Profile
Richard Meeran Square

Richard Meeran

Richard is co-head of the firm's International and Group Litigation Department

Blog Post
Trees from above
International Environment Corporate sustainability

EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive

Sandra Boye-Clarkson, Hatice Cobanoglu and Richard Meeran consider the latest European directive on mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence for companies.

Blog Post
Tea Plantation (1)
International Violence Against Women Agribusiness

The role of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in protecting the most vulnerable: Operational Grievance Mechanisms for women in agribusiness

Melanie Jacques and Sarah Gibbons begin the International Day of Violence Against Women series with a focus on violence against women in the agricultural sector. They discuss the role of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a tool for developing effective Operational Grievance Mechanisms as a means by which women can raise concerns and complaints about the human rights impacts of the operations in which they work.