Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The role of business in violations of human rights has been at the heart of international debates for decades. As early as the 1970s attempts were made at the UN by Global South nations (known as the G-77) to establish internationally-binding mechanisms to address corporate violations of human rights. Ultimately, those attempts were watered down into "codes of conduct". In the early 1990s, the "Washington Consensus" was used to steer states to deregulate and restructure their economies in a race-to-the-bottom that placed emphasis upon integrating the global economy over human rights and environmental protections. Although corporate violations existed before, it was only at this juncture that many human rights cases were brought into public view. Some litigation was pursued, but it was most often in tort, and sometimes in criminal courts. This article argues that the existing regional human rights courts have bolstered corporate human rights, while at the same time have remained on the sidelines of addressing corporate accountability. The emergent ASEAN human rights system has not yet developed a human rights court. The article suggests that there are key grassroots movements shaping human rights discourses around corporate accountability through the region and that these offer exciting prospects for an alternative approach to addressing corporate accountability through a prospective supervisory mechanism.

Introduction : the rarefied politics of global legal struggles -- From economic cannibalism to corporate human rights liabilities -- Different shades of voluntarism -- A manufactured consensus -- Tort law and the struggle against corporate human rights violations -- Struggles for corporate accountability in the human rights courts -- 'Human' rights for profit -- Conclusion : new mechanisms of accountability for corporate human rights violations?

This article presents an analysis of the way that profit-making corporations have sought human rights protections in the following two regional human rights courts: the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It seeks to deepen our understanding of a controversial principle in that corporations can claim protections as 'legal persons'. After exploring precisely how and why each of those regional systems have accepted claims for human rights protections by corporations and their shareholders, the article then develops an analysis of what the way that the regional human rights courts have carefully weighed their decisions implies more broadly about the prospects for human rights law to exhibit either system-threatening or system-preserving tendencies. The article then concludes by setting out a general principle of social ordering that underpins the decisions made in human rights courts.