Corporations and human rights - new challenges and solutions

Abstract

Introduction. The article examines the issues of legal personality related to human rights in international and national law and whether these relations are limited by the interaction of the state and the individual.Since 2016 the United States has been investigating alleged Russian meddling in the US election, which, in addition to hacker attacks, might have been carried out through social networks and services owned by the American multinational corporations – Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. Discussions in the Senate shed light on the business activities of the companies themselves which had an opportunity to manipulate and most likely manipulated the public consciousness, which is a violation of the basic human rights to freedom of choice, freedom of the media and others. At the same time this activity occurred with the alleged observance of legislation and contract law.The article discusses various aspects of the activities of Google and Facebook during a number of American electoral campaigns as evidence of corporate human rights violations.Materials and methods. The methodological basis of the study comprises general scientific (analysis, analogy, comparison) and special methods of researching legal phenomena and processes (method of interpretation of legal norms, technical-legal, formal-legal and formal-logical methods).The results of the study. Nowadays Corporations have reached a level of influence comparable to that of the states. But if for economists or political scientists there is no question of including companies in the legal personality structure, lawyers still have doubts. The analysis shows that the traditional approach to human rights as a relationship exclusively between the state and the individual does not fully meet modern realities. The person of legal relations is a participant in interaction regulated by the rules of law. The electoral campaigns in the United States in recent years show that large transnational corporations are able to violate the fundamental rights of the person enshrined in the constitution while observing secondary norms designed to ensure their implementation as well as contract law concerning user agreements.Discussion and conclusions. The necessity of considering human rights in the system of relations “state corporation – physical individual” was substantiated. The conclusion is made that corporations are a threat to the observance of human rights. The topicality of researching the American experience regarding Internet companies influencing the electoral processes in Russia was shown.