It is important to note that as the climate policy-making processes move forward, there are other processes too moving ahead which may help address corporate capture of development justice agenda! For example, civil society consultations are being held globally to help shape a possible global binding treaty on business and human rights. Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) along with International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) had organized the Asia Pacific consultation for such a global binding treaty in early May 2015, in which Citizen News Service (CNS) was represented. In June 2014, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution to elaborate a binding instrument "to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises". This provides another critical opportunity to advance corporate accountability.
All is not that dark! There is a legal precedent of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) where governments came together to kick Big Tobacco out of health policy-making! Ten years ago, Corporate Accountability International and its global network of civil society organizations secured a powerful international legal precedent when it led the charge to successfully kick the tobacco industry out of treaty talks at the World Health Organization negotiations of the FCTC. The success of the FCTC has enabled meaningful public health regulation that is unencumbered by industry profit motives and protects 90 percent of the world's population from one of the most deadly industries on the planet.
Let us hope that Paris COP-21 meeting will also adapt measures to firewall climate policy-making from industry interference.
Bobby Ramakant, Citizen News Service -- CNS
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