Setting the Stage
The Business and Human Rights (BHR) field has long been dominated by frameworks emanating from the Global North, most notably the 2011 United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), and more recently the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), among others. These instruments represent genuine normative progress in the quest to hold transnational corporate actors accountable for human rights and environmental violations. Yet, they also carry with them a particular set of assumptions: that accountability flows from formal corporate structures to legally recognized victims; that regulation works best when it travels outward from mature institutional environments to weaker ones; and that the primary sites of BHR standard-setting are in Global North cities such as Geneva, Brussels, and New York.
This Blog Symposium, co-hosted by the Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ) Blog and the African Law Studies (ALS) Blog, sets out to challenge these assumptions. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from across the African continent and the African diaspora, the contributions collected here insist on something that is too often left as a footnote in mainstream BHR scholarship: Africa is not merely a recipient of BHR norms. Africa is, in important respects, a norm-maker.
This is not simply an empirical claim about the density of existing legal frameworks on the continent — though as the contributions here demonstrate, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, regional courts, constitutional environmental provisions, customary legal orders, and sub-national legislation collectively constitute a rich and often undervalued regulatory landscape. It is also a normative and methodological claim about what BHR scholarship should look like, and whose experiences, philosophies, and institutional innovations should count as foundational rather than peripheral.
Published in pairs each Tuesday and Friday, our authors take the next three weeks to demonstrate African leadership in BHR. The symposium is structured as a progressive conversation, zooming in via continental normative foundations, RECs, national constitutional frameworks and community-based governance, before expanding again to spotlight blindspots, actors and future trajectories.
The symposium begins by asking what is distinctively African about BHR, exploring how concepts such as duties, solidarity and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights provide alternative normative foundations for corporate accountability. Building on these conceptual contributions, the symposium then turns to the regional level, examining how Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and continental economic integration have emerged as laboratories for innovative approaches to regulating business conduct. From there, the discussion moves to the domestic sphere, highlighting how constitutional frameworks and national legal systems translate these broader principles into concrete governance structures. As a final step of the analysis on the macro-micro spectrum, the symposium considers the local level, illustrating how customary governance and grassroots initiatives generate accountability from within communities themselves. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that African approaches to BHR are neither derivative nor merely responsive to global developments, but constitute original regulatory and normative innovations in their own right.
The second half of the symposium turns to spotlight actors and potential blindspots of BHR. It first considers how African governance frameworks seek to shape responsible markets through anti-corruption measures, child-centred governance and regional economic cooperation. The discussion then addresses one of the most significant blind spots in contemporary BHR scholarship: the regulation of illicit economies and shadow markets, illustrating both the conceptual and practical challenges of extending accountability beyond the formal corporate sphere. Finally, the symposium concludes by looking ahead to emerging fields of regulation, including legal pluralism and technology governance, where African legal systems continue to develop innovative responses to new forms of business-related human rights risks. Read as a whole, the symposium argues that Africa is not simply adapting global BHR standards; it is making an increasingly important contribution to redefining the field itself.
A Much-Needed Diagnosis
The starting point for this Symposium is a diagnosis. There is something structurally amiss in a field that has produced elaborate governance frameworks premised on formal corporate structures, state-centred duty-bearing, and compliance-driven due diligence, while vast swathes of economic life:from artisanal mining to informal market trading to indigenous apprenticeship systems,remain beyond the analytical reach of those frameworks. Several of the contributions in this collection, in different ways and from diverse vantage points, make this point. Dorcas Basimanyane observes that existing mandatory human rights due diligence frameworks are underpinned by what she calls a ‘Western regulatory imaginary’, one that treats African legal systems as existing in a ‘regulatory vacuum’, when in fact they are defined by a rich legal pluralism that combines state law, customary authority, and community-based accountability mechanisms. Philipp Bogensperger pushes this further, arguing that the very premise of mainstream BHR,that the primary perpetrators of corporate human rights violations are legally recognized entities subject to formal governance,misses the systemic human rights violations perpetrated by illicit business actors who flourish precisely where formal governance is weak or captured. Razan Ali’s contribution on Sudan’s shadow extractive industries gives this observation its sharpest edge: when state actors and armed groups simultaneously function as duty-bearers and primary violators, using gold revenues to finance war, compliance-focused BHR frameworks are simply incapable of responding to the problem.
From Diagnosis to Reconstruction
If the first move in this collection is diagnostic, the second is reconstructive. The contributions do not rest at critique. They demonstrate, across a remarkable range of legal settings and regulatory registers, that the resources for a more adequate BHR are already present in African law and governance — often in forms that have significant implications not merely for the continent, but for the global BHR field.
Central to this reconstructive effort is the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The African Charter, as Bantayehu Demlie Gezahegn argues, is a ‘norm leader’ in BHR precisely because of what orthodox BHR scholarship tends to treat as its idiosyncrasy: its language of duties. Articles 27 to 29, which impose duties on individuals as well as rights, have been interpreted by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights as providing a moral and legal basis for attributing direct obligations to corporations,a move that predates and in certain respects goes further than the UNGPs’ state-centric architecture. Isabelle Zundel deepens this analysis, arguing that Articles 21, 22, and 24 of the Charter, rooted in African historical, cultural, and philosophical traditions, should be embraced not apologetically but as genuine refinements of standard international frameworks — frameworks better suited to collective rights, to anti-colonial resource justice, and to the lived realities of communities facing environmental harm from extractive industries. Rosemary Mwanza rounds out this dimension of the symposium by documenting how African regional bodies have used Article 24 and cognate provisions to hold states and business actors accountable for environmental harm, establishing the African Charter as a genuine innovator in BHR environmental governance.
The contributors also engage with African regional economic and judicial institutions in ways that complicate and enrich the BHR field. Grace Sitati examines the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), a body that lacks explicit human rights or BHR jurisdiction but has nonetheless creatively applied EAC Treaty principles to address business-related human rights violations, demonstrating what might be called an ‘implied jurisdiction’ that has significant potential as a regional judicial remedy mechanism. Sebastian Krafzik’s analysis of the EU-SADC Economic Partnership Agreement highlights a persistent accountability asymmetry in trade agreements: commercial provisions are backed by binding dispute resolution, while sustainable development chapters lack the “teeth” necessary for enforcement and corporations benefit from market access with no corresponding BHR due diligence obligations. Collins Ajibo similarly interrogates the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA), asking whether its rights-based approach to corruption is sustainable given the institutional weaknesses that continue to impede human rights enforcement across many African jurisdictions.
African Constitutional and Domestic Law as a Site of BHR Practice
Three contributions in the symposium engage directly with the question of African constitutional and domestic law as a site of BHR practice,and they reveal a continent that is, in important respects, further advanced in operationalizing BHR through binding law than the standard narrative allows. Paula-Ann Novotny, Pooja Dela-Cron, and Emilly Gammon show how South Africa’s Constitution serves as a de facto BHR framework: the state’s duty to protect finds expression in section 7(2); the corporate responsibility to respect is embedded in the horizontal application of constitutional rights to private actors under section 8(2); and access to remedy is enshrined in section 34. Far from being an aspirational document, they argue, the South African Constitution bridges the gap between the UNGPs’ soft-law pillars and legally enforceable obligations, giving practitioners the tools to operationalize BHR through domestic courts. Robert Nanima extends this analysis to children, arguing that existing BHR governance systems systematically fail to recognize African children as direct stakeholders — and that a genuinely child-centred BHR architecture, drawing on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, requires ex ante risk assessment, child-sensitive indicators, community-based monitoring, and automatic accountability triggers. He calls for a shift in how BHR is evaluated: not by its capacity to remediate harm, but by its capacity to prevent it and ensure non-repetition.
Two contributions in this symposium draw attention to the transformative potential of African indigenous philosophies and grassroots agency — dimensions of BHR that formal legal analysis consistently undervalues. Adaeze Okoye examines the Anambra State Igbo Apprenticeship Law of 2025, a remarkable piece of sub-national legislation that seeks to formalize and revitalize the Igbo “igba-boi” apprenticeship system through the lens of Ubuntu and Igwebuike philosophy. The contribution argues that indigenous African business governance practices can be integrated into formal legal frameworks in ways that advance socio-economic rights — provided that the resulting regulatory architecture respects and draws upon, rather than suppresses, the customary foundations of those practices. Eskedar Awgichew Ergete, writing about informal waste workers and youth activists in Ethiopia, insists that accountability does not begin in boardrooms or courtrooms but in neighbourhoods, schools, and informal settlements. Her contribution challenges the dominant narrative that positions grassroots actors as victims to be protected by BHR frameworks, and instead argues for their recognition as foundational to BHR practice itself.
What to Take Away From This Symposium?
Across these fourteen contributions, certain recurring themes emerge. The first is the insufficiency of formalism. Whether the critique is directed at due diligence frameworks that require legal corporate subjects, at trade agreements that privilege commercial enforcement over human rights, or at BHR governance that is adult-centred and compliance-driven, the contributors converge on a shared diagnosis: the formal architecture of BHR, as currently constructed, systematically excludes precisely the actors, relationships, and settings where the most serious human rights violations occur in African contexts.
The second is the richness of African legal pluralism as a resource for BHR. The contributions demonstrate, through detailed legal analysis, that African legal systems:customary law, constitutional frameworks, regional human rights instruments, and indigenous philosophical traditions, contain within them the normative and institutional resources for a more nuanced approach to business and human rights. These resources have not been absent from African societies. They have been absent from the mainstream BHR scholarship.
The third theme, which we wish to name explicitly, is the question of positionality and voice in BHR scholarship. Who gets to define the problems of BHR? Whose legal traditions count as sources of norms rather than objects of study? Whose institutional innovations are treated as contributions to the field rather than local variations to be noted and set aside? This Symposium does not resolve these questions — they are among the most contested in international law and in legal theory more broadly. But it insists, through the choices reflected in its curation and in the arguments advanced by its contributors, that Africa has produced, and continues to produce, some of the most important thinking about what real progress in the field of business and human rights requires in practice.
We are grateful to all the contributors for their insight, generosity, and intellectual courage. We hope that this collection will be read not merely as a contribution to African legal studies, but as an invitation to rethink some of the foundational assumptions of the global BHR field.
