The United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations Archive

On 2 August 1974, the UN Economic and Social Council adopted Resolution 1908 (LVII), which established the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations (the UNCTC) as a permanent organ of the UN. The preamble to the Resolution framed the UNCTC as part of the agenda of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), an alternative vision of international law premised on the recognition of interrelations and dependencies. The scope of the UNCTC's work included research on the behaviour of corporations in global markets; providing consultations on the subject matter to ECOSOC and Member States; and developing cooperation programmes relevant to transnational corporations.

The central task on the agenda of the UNCTC was the drafting of the United Nations Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations (the Code of Conduct). Negotiations over the Code of Conduct were heavily policed by economically powerful actors – the UNCTC didn't table a draft until 1983, nearly a decade after its establishment.

Fierce opposition from business, liberal economists, and Western mainstream media, combined with the weakening of the Third World's bargaining position thanks to the debt crisis, oil glut and the onslaught of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes meant that the draft Code of Conduct languished at the UNCTC. Despite successive revisions to make the Code of Conduct more favourable to Capitalist interests – essentially making it an instrument aimed at encouraging foreign investment – the draft Code was formally abandoned in 1992. The UNCTC itself lasted only another year, when it was transferred in 1993 to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, where it was implemented by UNCTAD's Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development as the Programme on Transnational Corporations.

This archive was born out of an encounter at the fringes of the UN Treaty Talks on Business and Human Rights with one of the former employees of the UNCTC, Harris Gleckman, who generously offered to share a trove of UNCTC documents. The archive seeks to draw attention to the rich work of the UNCTC not as the story of an inevitable failure, nor as the history of a heroic victory, but as a potential resource for contemporary struggles.

The archive is a collaboration between the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at Melbourne Law School, André Dao at Melbourne Law School, Shahd Hammouri at Kent Law School, and Harris Gleckman, former UNCTC staff member. Research assistance was provided by Debaranjan Goswami and the Melbourne Law School Research Service.

To celebrate the launch of the archive, André and Shahd edited a symposium of responses to the archive for the TWAIL Review. Read the introduction to the symposium here. The symposium includes pieces by Wanshu Cong on transnational corporations and the information society, Caitlin Murphy on corporations and supply chains, Kalika Mehta on the UNCTC’s research plans, River Baars on Walter Rodney and the radical futures foreclosed by the UNCTC, and Shahd Hammouri’s call for a public tribunal for corporations involved in the Israeli war economy.

A preview of the archive is available below. To access PDFs of specific documents, please visit the archive site at unctc-archive.org. The archive remains a work in progress – anyone with copies of the missing documents should get in touch with the Laureate Program.