This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

The 1987 Constitution of Zimbabwe provided for an executive presidency elected directly by the people every six years, starting from 1990. In the 1996 presidential race, the full-blown severe impact of ESAP was destroying peoples’ lives across Zimbabwe. Electoral manipulation was utilised excessively and perpetrated blatantly, even when manipulating in this manner was not essential to winning. The 1996 election was marked by voter apathy, with only 32 per cent of the electorate participating. The main opposition parties remained moribund under an un-inspiring leadership of questionable figures like Abel Muzorewa, Ndabaningi Sithole and Edgar Tekere, and they did not consciously broaden their appeal to a wider social base. They stood little chance of dislodging the Zanu PF party from power. Civil society mobilised citizens around civic rights, human rights, and economic and women’s issues. The more prominent ones amongst them included the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation (Zimrights), the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), the Women’s Action Group (WAG) and the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA). It was eloquent testimony to their growing strength and national credibility that some of them were able to organise a series of general strikes around both economic and political grievances.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the more common human rights violations with corporate involvement. The non-exhaustive overview aims to provide some initial insights into how corporate conduct can affect and impact human rights and to show the breadth of issues that fall under a BHR lens. Hence, the focus is on problems rather than solutions. The issues and violations dealt with are selected with a view on multinational corporations in particular. Furthermore, the selected issues are cross-cutting – that is, not specific to one particular industry. The chapter covers human rights problems relating to employment relations, corporate supply chains, affected communities, the environment, and particularly vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples or human rights defenders. Violations include discrimination, child labor, forced labor and modern slavery, and land grabbing, among others.

This chapter examines the fraught terrain of REDD+ implementation ‘on the ground’, with a specific focus on three strategies that have been central to efforts towards social safeguards: benefit sharing, tenure reform, and rights to consultation and to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). It reads these three strategies as mechanisms for mediating the potential tensions between different – and potentially competing – demands: those ‘from below’, for rights and recognition, and imperatives ‘from above’, for ensuring that specific obligations are enforceable through the responsibilisation of local actors. This chapter examines how these competing demands play out in REDD+ implementation and suggests that these three strategies might not necessarily be emancipatory for people living in and around forested areas, but rather they may operate to facilitate the greater disciplinary inclusion of forest peoples in the ‘green economy’ and thereby further consolidate the actualisation of new forms of global authority through REDD+.

Finally, in Chapter 12, Caroline Dommen concludes our discussion by addressing how human rights impact assessments can contribute to ensuring that Indigenous rights are upheld in international trade agreements. She considers how explicit reference to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, may improve human rights impact assessments as well as trade agreements, from both legal and policy perspectives. There is now a substantial body of impact assessments of actual or likely impacts of trade and investment agreements on human rights, including on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Her chapter describes the role and the objectives of impact assessment, explaining the particular advantages of human rights-based impact assessment. It draws on recommendations of UN human rights mechanisms and analysis of completed impact assessments of trade agreements to present some of the main principles of human rights law that are relevant in the trade policy context, and how these impose legal obligations on states to carry out human rights impact assessments prior to adopting new trade agreements.

In Chapter 8, Brenda Gunn looks to Canada as an example when she provides an analysis of how states have obligations to ensure the protection and promotion of Indigenous peoples’ rights in international investment agreements. Professor Gunn’s chapter begins by discussing some of the rights of Indigenous peoples that are potentially threatened by investment agreements, with a focus on land rights and the right to participate in decision-making on the basis of free, prior and informed consent. She concludes with a discussion of what measures need to be taken in investment agreements to ensure that Indigenous peoples’ rights are properly protected during the negotiation and implementation of investment agreements. This includes reference to the obligations of states and business enterprises to ensure that investment agreements protect Indigenous peoples’ rights while at the same time promoting foreign direct investment.

Having defined the field, Chapter 3 critically analyses the surrounding contemporary formal legal framework for indigenous peoples’ land rights that speak to development projects. This chapter examines jurisprudential strands and structural gaps such as poor accountability of private actors and the fragmented due diligence in this field. Emerging from this analysis are identifiable themes that matter for rights in development project contexts. The point is to assess the existing coping strategies of formal law in this setting, to give hard law context to the private mechanisms explored and to appreciate judicial and non-judicial mechanisms as part of an ecosystem of remedies in this field. The chapter asks why, despite the array of indigenous rights cases and legal declarations, international and domestic norms rarely pierce the highly regulated veil of private mechanisms that secure a transnational development project – failing to work as a legal threat. Whilst later chapters illustrate other reasons such as power and short-term behaviour that contribute to law’s overshadowing, my aim here is to show how the law endogenously contributes to insecurity for indigenous communities in development contexts.