Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Should Corporations Be Held To Same Human Rights Laws As People?

via Dvorak News Blog by Uncle Dave on 2/28/12

UPDATE: Here is the latest.

The [Supreme Court] will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.
[...]
Many “friend of the court” briefs filed by corporations in this case contend that the companies are committed to voluntarily complying with human rights norms — but that standards set by the United Nations and other public and private organizations are mere guidelines that are not enforceable as legal norms. What they are really saying is that there are legal norms against torture and such, but that they can’t be enforced against corporations because they have never been enforced under international law — a claim the plaintiffs strongly contest.

This leaves the Supreme Court with an extraordinary choice to make, in juxtaposition to its previous ruling in Citizens United: whether to accept an argument that, in effect, leaves corporations less culpable than individuals are for human rights violations committed abroad — or whether to hold that if a 200-year-old law can be used to hold individual violators to account, it can be used against corporate violators as well.

No comments:

Post a Comment