(Transnational) Corporations and Human Rights: an exploration into the accomodation of capital in international human rights law (original) (raw)
There is empirical evidence that corporations, often in collusion with states, are involved in and directly connected to a variety of human rights violations. Despite this evidence, nation-states and the international community of states have been unwilling or unable to respond to these violations in any adequate measure. At the same time, the discourse of human rights has become integral to state legitimacy in a post-Cold War society. An analysis of the legal structure of the corporation and its omnipresence in the global political economy raises questions about the overarching framework of an international human rights law that protects corporations in analogous ways to physical persons. The extension of rights to corporations reveals a human rights paradigm that holds private property and capitalist accumulation at the core of its value system. This thesis scrutinises the association between human rights and corporations and raises questions about whether human rights law can be ...
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2013
In the context of neoliberal globalisation, the enhanced projection of corporate power appears to have increased the chances of transnational corporations (TNCs) becoming embroiled in human rights violations. Reactively, the United Nations has expended significant political capital over the past thirteen years in its attempt to construct a framework to mitigate these negative human rights impacts. However, this emerging regime has proved to be controversial for activists and academics, due to its lack of enforcement mechanisms, as well as the conceptual minimalism inherent in its redistribution of rights responsibilities. When analysing its anachronistic theoretical underpinnings, and its misguided belief in the power of norm dynamics to alter corporate behaviour, the inadequacies of this minimalist framework are clearly exposed. Overall, the available empirical analyses into this fledgling field of study suggest that the prevailing international framework has failed to provoke a synthesis of internationally proclaimed human rights standards with the sphere of transnational corporate activity.
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