Africa at the Table: Reshaping Global Corporate Accountability through Treaty Law

Abstract

This article offers a novel contribution to the literature on global constitutionalism by reinterpreting Africa’s engagement with the proposed UN treaty on business and human rights as a constitutional intervention rather than a peripheral policy role. While existing analyses often depict African participation as fragmented or reactive, this paper argues that African states are advancing a distinct normative agenda grounded in regional legal traditions, particularly the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and rooted in principles of solidarity, collective responsibility, and the right to development. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law and postcolonial constitutional theory, the article demonstrates that Africa’s regional jurisprudence articulates an alternative constitutional vision of global economic governance, one that challenges the dominance of liberal individualism and the legal insulation of transnational corporations. Through doctrinal analysis of treaty drafts, African legal instruments, and recent developments in the intergovernmental negotiations, the article reveals how African actors are reshaping global legal norms from the margins. In doing so, it repositions Africa not as a recipient of global constitutionalism but as a site of its transformation, an original and under-recognized force in rethinking corporate accountability in international law.