The accountability gap in Africa’s extractive sector is not a result of the absence of binding legal frameworks or investment regulations. The African human rights system has advanced global jurisprudence by introducing and applying innovative human rights and investment norms. Despite the robust human rights regime, including legally binding regional norms for redressing human rights abuses, local communities continue to suffer the consequences of extractive MNCs’ egregious human rights abuses without access to remedies. Corporate impunity is often fueled by governments’ reluctance or inability to hold these corporations accountable and by local communities’ limited access to effective remedies. While extractive MNCs in Africa are legally obligated to respect human rights, the continent needs a robust enforcement mechanism and the political will to hold defaulting enterprises accountable. Hence, I propose strategies to implement the region’s rich human rights and investment initiatives and to narrow the accountability gap in the extractive sector.

The private sector is the main engine of economic growth, with corporations contributing to the development of countries where they operate.1 However, concerns persist regarding the negative impacts of corporate activities, ranging from unethical and irresponsible business conduct to environmental deterioration, corruption, indigenous and local communities’ land rights violations, and human rights abuses.2

European corporations have recently discovered vast quantities of oil and gas in Namibia, presenting significant opportunities and risks. Business and human rights (BHR) principles should be applied to the projects, but this paper is motivated by a concern that extant BHR norms are partial and inadequate, particularly in light of global economic and environmental crises. Starting from a critique of liberal human rights, this paper develops a human rights realisation-oriented vision of BHR designed to capture the root causes of harm and to enforce developmental objectives upon corporations. We study the African philosophical concept of ‘Ubuntu’, the 1970s UN Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, and a 2023 report on business and the right to development to develop specific principles underlying this more comprehensive version of BHR. In conclusion we argue that a more confrontational and egalitarian vision of BHR is needed to address today’s grand challenges.

This article examines how operational-level grievance mechanisms (OGMs) implemented by transnational mining companies in Africa entrench corporate control over victims’ access to remedy. Although OGMs are central to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, their deployment in weak governance contexts often transforms them from early-warning tools into the sole avenue for redress. Through a comparative analysis of four different mines that reveal converging mining and business and human rights dynamics unique to Africa, this article considers how OGMs reproduce power asymmetries through opaque procedures, limited consultation, information imbalances, and unpredictable remedies. These dynamics undermine the UNGPs’ effectiveness criteria and reveal structural gaps within Pillar Three’s design. The article argues for alternatives, such as independent grievance mechanisms and additional guidance on implementing the UNGPs that guarantee legal representation, prohibit restrictive waivers, and introduce sector-specific recommendations. Without such changes, OGMs risk legitimising corporate abuses rather than remedying harm.

Operational-level grievance mechanisms are often viewed as a means to empower rightsholders to access remedy for human rights abuses. This article presents qualitative research findings on Kakuzi’s ‘Independent Human Rights Mechanism’, a mechanism specifically designed to provide remedy for human rights abuses. Kakuzi’s grievance mechanism takes place in the context of historical land injustices, whereby thousands of squatters are subject to practices of enclosure—territorial, legal and epistemic—that legitimate Kakuzi’s authority over the land.

The article takes an actor-oriented approach, following grievances across their full trajectory—from community members’ injurious experience, to those grievances heard by the mechanism, to representation of community grievances in corporate disclosure—while foregrounding the agency communities exercise in relation to the mechanism. The mechanism delimits which grievances are admissible and remediable. Communities dissent from this delimitation through various strategies. Corporate disclosure of grievances then distorts local realities.

Business and human rights class litigation in South Africa has increased over the last ten years. Through the analysis of Various Parties on behalf of Minors v Anglo American South Africa Limited (2020/32777) (2023) ZAGPJHC 1474 (Kabwe) and silicosis class action litigation, the author examines how the South African judiciary has contributed to the advancement of business and human rights objectives. The piece traverses the purposive statutory interpretation approach of the court and incremental development of class action certifications to contribute to this outcome. It is argued that the rejection of the opt-out class participation mechanism for a wholly foreign class in Kabwe represents a missed opportunity to further transnational corporate accountability in certification applications by using key tenets of Ubuntu and decolonization. Such an interpretation would have offered a compelling pathway for localizing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the African context.