Tratado internacional de los pueblos para el control de las empresas transnacionales. Una apuesta desde los movimientos sociales y la solidaridad internacional

Abstract

Transnational companies have become powerful agents that directly and indirectly condition state and international normative production, through formal and informal agreements at the world level and specific mechanisms of conflict resolution, outside the criteria and foundations of judicial power. Thus, while multinational companies protect their contracts and investments through a host of norms, conventions, treaties and agreements that make up a new Global Corporate Law, the so-called lex mercatoria, there are neither sufficient counterbalances nor effective mechanisms for controlling its social, labor, cultural and environmental impacts. International Human Rights Law and International Labor Law are unable to counteract the spread of International Commercial Law as the foundation of the whole globalized economic architecture. In this context, different social movements, originary peoples, trade unionists, jurists, activists and victims of the practices of multinationals have for years been defending the need to establish effective mechanisms to control transnational companies. All of them, together with the organizations that form part of the Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power, have taken part in elaborating the International Peoples' Treaty on the Control of Transnational Corporations. This is an alternative proposal for exercising real control over the operations of the big corporations, which is articulated on the basis of the key ideas that we present in this notebook.