(Transnational) Corporations and Human Rights: an exploration into the accomodation of capital in international human rights law.

Abstract

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 used to challenge corporate power.The thesis is an empirically based inquiry into the perspectives of judges from the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights on the potential for human rights law to respond to corporate harms. As such, the thesis seeks to examine the role that human rights courts play in using existing mechanisms of human rights law in cases involving corporate violations. The data was gathered from a detailed analysis of case law from these regional human rights systems, as well as fifteen interviews with judges from these Courts. It reveals that the open-texture of the law and the use of international human rights courts in counter-hegemonic struggles is a strong indication of the possibility for alternative uses of human rights law. These alternative uses of law are illustrative of the potential to challenge the relative impunity afforded to corporations from within the very system that has been developed to protect them.