In October 2025, Lara Strangways, Beyond’s Co-Director was in Zambia at the UNBHR Forum Africa 2025, hosting a panel on “Enhancing Judicial Understanding of BHR cases”. Some of her reflections are captured here.
“The door has been opened” – but few can walk through it
We recently convened, in partnership with A4ID and UNDP, a panel of judges, lawyers and civil society actors from across the African region to focus on one question: why are workers and communities not getting justice in business and human rights cases across Africa? What followed was a candid conversation about why that is and what it would take to change it.
From a Kenyan perspective, senior members of the judiciary reflected that many of the traditional procedural barriers to public interest litigation have been addressed. The constitution has created space for rights-based claims, and specialised courts – such as the Environment and Land Court and the Employment and Labour Relations Court – are, in practice, where most business and human rights cases should land.
Yet even there, jurisdictional confusion persists. Not because the law is unclear, but because, as one participant noted, “sometimes the advocates do not know which court to go to.” The door has been opened for public interest litigation – but people still need help finding the right entrance. Three structural barriers stood out:
- Lack of awareness – Communities cannot bring cases they don’t know they have. Many affected workers or communities do not recognise business-related harms as rights violations, or they don’t see courts as a realistic pathway to remedy.
- Cost – Even where people know their rights, they often cannot afford filing fees, travel or legal representation. Courts can waive fees, but most people don’t know that is possible, and navigating the bureaucracy itself is daunting.
- Weak links in the “justice chain” – The judiciary sits at the very end of a long chain of actors: regulators, investigators, administrative bodies, company grievance mechanisms. If they fail to do their part, the judge is left with a badly prepared case, weak evidence or procedural defects. The way a case is brought often determines its outcome.
The clear message: we need a strategic, collaborative approach where every duty-bearer understands their role, does their job, and arrives in court prepared.
Home-grown solutions
Participants from the legal profession stressed that solutions cannot simply be imported; they need to be rooted in local institutions and practice. A few mechanisms could be created:
- Bar–bench committees where magistrates, judges and lawyers regularly discuss emerging issues, including business and human rights, and troubleshoot systemic problems.
- Multi-stakeholder committees that bring together community members, police and other local actors to discuss issues affecting specific communities before they escalate. These spaces could empower local leaders to act as “justice ambassadors” who carry information back into remote or marginalised areas.
These reforms could create channels of communication and trust that can be used to surface business and human rights harms earlier and more safely.
The training gap: judges, lawyers and law schools
Across the board, participants highlighted a big training gap. Many people assume judges and lawyers are conversant with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the nuances of corporate accountability. In reality, most have never received structured training in this area.
- Judicial training academies in some countries have had no dedicated courses on business and human rights at all, often for simple budgetary reasons.
- Lawyers are also largely self-taught on these issues, relying on ad hoc workshops or donor-funded projects rather than systematic professional training.
- Law schools still tend to teach human rights as purely state-centred. For many in the room, when they studied law, the idea that corporations could be duty-bearers in human rights was barely on the horizon.
There was broad agreement that this has to change. Participants emphasised the need for:
- Curriculum reform in law schools to mainstream business and human rights early – “get them when they are young”.
- Dedicated judicial and bar training on corporate accountability, with practical case studies.
- Practical tools, such as a judicial benchbook on business and human rights, to provide quick guidance on jurisdiction, applicable standards and evidentiary questions.
Women judges’ associations and other professional bodies were seen as particularly well placed to lead training that also engages communities directly – for example, on sexual and gender-based violence linked to business operations.
When judgments don’t bite: enforcement
Even when communities manage to overcome all the hurdles and win in court, a familiar problem emerges: orders are not enforced. Participants shared examples where communities secured favourable judgments, only to see them remain on paper with no follow-up, monitoring, or consequences for non-compliance. Without enforcement, even the strongest legal principles lose credibility. This is particularly acute in land and environmental disputes, where commercial actors may continue operating despite court rulings, or where state actors fail to act on orders.
The group discussed the need for:
- Systematic follow-up on court orders, possibly via court-linked monitoring mechanisms or partnerships with civil society.
- Clearer parameters for out-of-court settlements, to ensure that communities are not pressured into signing away their rights through “ouster clauses” or opaque arbitration clauses that foreclose future legal recourse.
Land, precedent and the weight of context
Several speakers returned to land as a flashpoint for business and human rights litigation.
There is still limited jurisprudence on the nuances of land rights, especially communal and customary tenure. Courts often have to “build precedents from the ground up” in complex factual situations where legal titles, legitimate expectations and historical occupancy are playing out.
In one illustrative case, a court declined to cancel the commercial land title but still managed to send a strong signal that corporate actors cannot act with impunity. The lesson was not that the law is powerless, but that how a case is framed – the narrative, the context, the evidence linking corporate conduct to community harms – can be decisive.
Participants stressed:
- The importance of centering communal rights in pleadings, so they are not lost in the technical fray.
- The need for capacity building on survivor and community interviewing in a business and human rights context. Without safe, trauma-informed ways of gathering testimony, many of the most critical stories never reach the court in a form it can be used.
- A more deliberate effort to link the evidence to the lived realities of displacement – for example, thinking about a pregnant woman who loses access to prenatal care when an entire community is moved.
When justice becomes an academic exercise
Colleagues from other jurisdictions described how, in some cases, business and human rights litigation can feel like an “academic exercise”. In contexts where:
- Rights related to corporate harm are not clearly codified;
- Procedural rules are extremely strict, leading to cases being struck out on technicalities;
- Cases take 10, 15, even 20 years to be heard; and
- Multinational corporations operate through multiple layers of subsidiaries that can be liquidated or reorganised before judgment…
…by the time a decision is rendered, many victims have died, companies have changed shape, and remedies are impossible to implement. The law has, formally, been applied – but justice has not been done.
On top of this, evidentiary barriers are steep:
- It is expensive to hire technical experts.
- There is often no meaningful obligation on companies to disclose internal documents.
- Governments may be complicit or reluctant to cooperate.
Without evidence, there is no case – “the case is killed before it even starts”.
Participants argued for specialised benches or fast-track mechanisms for complex business and human rights cases, as well as stronger roles for civil society and the media in amplifying community experiences and countering intimidation by powerful corporate actors.
Plural pathways to remedy
While courts remain central, there was recognition that they cannot carry the burden alone.
Participants called for embracing the plural nature of justice systems:
- Mediation and community-based dispute resolution, where appropriate and safe.
- Administrative remedies and regulatory actions that can deliver quicker results.
- Strategic litigation that not only seeks redress for individuals, but also pushes courts to clarify evidentiary thresholds and, where possible, adapt legal standards to make remedy realistically accessible.
Crucially, judges themselves should begin to meet and reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t, and to learn from each other across borders. Partners expressed interest in connecting these experiences through peer-learning programmes and embedding business and human rights work within broader rule of law and security portfolios.
Hard questions we still need to answer
The session closed with a set of unresolved but vital questions:
- Who is representing the interests of those who are most marginalised?
- At what point should courts be willing to look beyond strict evidentiary gaps, especially where structural barriers make proof nearly impossible?
- Can courts develop alternative processes to ensure that, even when formal remedies are out of reach, communities can still obtain some form of recognition or redress?
- How do we ensure that people in remote or marginalised communities even know that legal remedies exist – and can safely access them?
No single institution can answer these questions alone. But the conversation made one thing clear: if business and human rights is to mean anything in practice, we need to strengthen every link in the justice chain – from community awareness and legal aid, through investigation and regulation, all the way to the courtroom and beyond, into the messy terrain of enforcement and real-world change.