Open letter to members of the OECD Responsible Business Conduct Committee
We – a broad range of Indigenous Peoples’ organisations, Afro-descendant Peoples’ organisations, territorial and human rights defenders and rights-holders directly affected by corporate activities, along with our local and international civil society allies – write to you ahead of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Inclusive Platform for Due Diligence Policy Cooperation meeting, taking place in Paris during the Responsible Business Conduct week (RBC week), 29 June – 2 July 2026.
We welcome the OECD’s efforts and Recommendation of the Council on the Role of Government in Promoting Responsible Business Conduct, and in the 50th year of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct (OECD Guidelines) we collectively call for greater ambition by OECD member states to adopt and enforce binding measures to hold multinational companies to account for individual and collective human rights violations and environmental destruction, and to ensure the provision of remedy.
Such measures must be aligned with international human rights law instruments, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and jurisprudence protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination, lands, territories and resources, and to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). They should also be aligned with instruments and jurisprudence protecting the collective rights of other land-connected communities and peoples with collective customary tenure systems, which they govern wholly or partially under customary law, and who maintain their own political, social, cultural, and economic institutions. It is also key that the rights of women within these groups are clearly articulated in any binding measure.
We further call for such requirements to be a condition of accession to the OECD.
For centuries, the dominant models of extraction, production, transnational trade and multinational businesses have had profoundly negative impacts on human rights, cultures, lands, wellbeing and the environment. Too often, these models have been imposed without meaningful participation or consent, undermining human rights, governance systems, and ability of peoples to determine their own futures.
Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and other land-connected communities are experiencing increasing violence, intimidation and killings, and the alarming closure of civic space, including the repression of protest and use of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. We are also highly concerned about the increasing use of state-backed and/or state-encouraged private security who are operating with absolute impunity to protect the business interests of multinational companies, often at the expense of the rights, safety and well-being of affected peoples and communities.
With this year’s RBC week focusing on ‘responsible business in a world of transition’, we urge you to consider the cumulative impact on these diverse peoples and communities of an increasingly unstable geopolitical context, the deliberate erosion of international human rights law, the rapidly expanding investment in militarisation and escalation in wars and conflicts, the global energy and food security crisis and the related increasing demand for transition minerals, biofuels and renewable energy projects which frequently require resources from within their territories.
Across many regions, these transitions are being pursued without adequate safeguards for Indigenous Peoples, for Afro-descendant Peoples or for other affected land-connected communities, creating new pressures on lands, territories, resources and traditional livelihoods, particularly for women and girls. The threats to their cultures, land, territories, resources and governance systems continue to grow, while the space for exercising human rights is increasingly constrained.
