Environmental Pollution and Human Rights Violations by Multinational Corporations

Abstract

In the modern corporate and market-oriented world, multinational corporations have become the most important and influential entity out of all the business related parties around the world. Multinational corporations are stronger due to their huge monetary assets which most of the times defeat the monetary capacities of some countries. Their wealth has given them an opportunity to gain the power against almost all the entities in the world. Even though these multinational corporations are wealthier and powerful, in order to increase further benefits and power by competing with competitors in the markets, these multinational corporations follow numerous illegal activities. These illegal activities have a huge negative influence towards the society. Crimes which are conducted by individuals do harm the society, yet, crimes which are conducted by multinational corporations harm the society in a larger scale. Multinational corporations are not limited to one country. The main office or the headquarters of the company is located in one country while the subsidiaries have been located in many other countries. Hence, corporate crimes affect not only the country or the society which its main office is located, but also every other country which has their subsidiaries. Even though there are many laws which prevent and penalize crimes, it is really hard for the law enforcement authorities to execute multinational corporations compared to individuals. Currently, environmental pollution and human rights violations by multinational corporations have become major issues which influence the society with negative implications. In this paper, the writer critically discusses the environmental pollution and human rights violations by multinational corporations with few examples.