Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Baars, Grietje --- "From the Dutch East India Company to the Corporate Bill of Rights: corporations and international law" [2015] ELECD 1322; in Mattei, Ugo; Haskell, D. John (eds), "Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015) 260

Book Title: Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law

Editor(s): Mattei, Ugo; Haskell, D. John

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781005347

Section: Chapter 17

Section Title: From the Dutch East India Company to the Corporate Bill of Rights: corporations and international law

Author(s): Baars, Grietje

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

The corporation – and especially its more complex, globally networked version, the multinational enterprise – is increasingly a target of intense debate. Critics report on ‘corporate complicity’ in conflict situations, environmental disasters and degradation in the oil, gas and mining sectors, the privatisation of war through the use of mercenary-like contractors, the monopolisation of intellectual property rights over essential medicines, the buying up of vast swathes of agricultural land in poverty-stricken areas of the Third World, the commodification and for-profit provision of various previously essential public services such as education and healthcare, and finally the seemingly reckless speculation on financial markets, leading to taxpayer-funded bailouts. It is felt that corporate power is able to grow unchecked, giving rise to ‘corporate excess’, that international trade rules are skewed in corporations’ favour,that bilateral investment treaties and instruments such as the putative transatlantic trade and investment treaty (TTIP) will provide a ‘Corporate Bill of Rights’, that ‘corporate accountability’ is falling short, and that we experience ‘governance by corporations’. Indeed, it has come to the point, perhaps the point of neoliberalism’s resolution between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’, that we increasingly look to corporations for leadership in both the realm of ideas and management. Although oftentimes corporations’ influence over, abuse of, or impunity from, international law is identified as a key cause of our discomfort with corporate power, a deeper understanding of the precise relationship between (multinational) corporations and (international) law remains absent in such critiques.