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3 June 2026, MPIL Heidelberg

On June 3, 2026, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law held its 348th Ibero-American Colloquium, which adressed the limits and potential of the current international framework regarding “gender-transformative” reparations for corporate human rights violations.

The Max Planck Institute invited Professor Helena Catalina Rivera Cediel (Faculty of Law, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia), who shared the preliminary results of her research project An Evidence-Based Approach to “Gender-Transformative Reparation” in Human Rights: A Study in Latin America, co-directed by Professor Laura Bernal-Bermúdez. This project focuses on quantitative and qualitative empirical research to understand the specific needs and demands of women in contexts of human rights violations by companies, to understand how they are particularly affected by corporate human rights violations, and thus to achieve effective, sustainable, and transformative reparations that address the gender-based inequalities women face in these contexts. The research constitutes one of the first empirical and participatory approaches to the question of how women affected by systemic human rights violations by companies in Latin America understand, experience, and define reparations from a gender perspective.

Taking the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a starting point, a central objective of the project is to analyze the concept of “gender-transformative reparations,” as defined by the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights in 2019. As a result, the presentation highlighted the current lack of a methodology for assessing harm from a gender perspective, as well as an approach to implementing gender-transformative reparations.

Subsequently, the study employed an inductive approach inspired by ethnographic research, based on fieldwork in two cases in Colombia where human rights are being violated in the context of corporate coal extraction and mining activities in El Platanal and El Topacio (Colombia). Fieldwork was also conducted in Alta Verapaz (Guatemala) to understand the perspectives and needs of victims following human rights violations committed in the context of hydroelectric dam construction.

The study revealed that corporate activities had profoundly altered the social fabric of the communities, negatively impacting women’s lived experiences in particular. The harms identified ranged from sexual and reproductive harm and the effects of environmental damage, to the burden of assuming new roles and duties in society with considerable risks. Based on the fieldwork, the research project has identified a new category of harm, namely “spiritual harm,” which is particularly relevant to the Q’eqchi’ Maya of Alta Verapaz.

Field studies identified a multitude of demands from the interviewees regarding the types of reparations they sought, such as financial compensation, the reconstruction of social structures prior to the human rights violations, or the complete dismantling of the business project.

This revealed how, from the researchers’ perspective, “transformative” approaches to reparations must be victim-centered and tailored to individual cases to avoid the risk of imposing external standards.

Based on these results, Professor Rivera Cediel proposed a provisional framework that builds on research grounded in feminist reparations theory, structural and historical reparations, as well as academic work on business and human rights, resulting in a diversification of the types of harm suffered and the types of women affected, with the aim of avoiding a homogenization of the rights holders involved. These variables are thus formulated as a possible basis for calculating sustainable and effective reparation, which will be developed in the future phase of the project.

The subsequent discussion explored some of the tensions generated by a “transformative” approach. While transformation imposed by external standards can exacerbate harm or cause new harm, it is important to recognize that gender-transformative reparation holds legal and social potential that the project can help to realize. From a normative perspective as well, it was proposed that it might be useful to maintain a broad definition of “gender-transformative harm” in international law. Finally, the discussion focused on the role of the Inter-American Human Rights System, where significant standards on business and human rights have already been developed both in reports by the Commission and in various contentious cases such as Fábrica de Fuegos v. Brazil (2020) or La Oroya v. Peru (2023), decided by the Inter-American Court. There have also been significant advances in gender-sensitive human rights standards in the advisory opinions OC 31 of 2025 (right to care) and OC 32 of 2025 (human rights and the climate emergency) of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which can contribute to the development of a gender-sensitive approach to reparations. Following the research approach of the ICCAL, it was also proposed to reconstruct the category of gender-transformative reparation using the constitutional technique of principle-based interpretation, which would allow for balancing the need for reparation that corrects gender asymmetries without losing sensitivity to the context. It was also recommended to examine how regional constitutional jurisprudence can contribute to a multilevel transformative constitutionalism in the context of human rights violations caused by companies.