FWD: Comment & Analysis / Bang to rights / The Guardian Weekly
19-10-2000, page 13

George Monbiot on a legal absurdity

Bang to rights

T he new Human Rights Act insists that we have an inalienable right both
to life itself and to the freedoms without which that life would be
wretched. But while the rights it guarantees have proved fairly easy to
define, the concept of humanity turns out to be precarious.

Human beings, you might have thought, are animate, bipedal creatures a
bit like you and me. But the lawyers would have it otherwise. Big
companies might not breathe or speak or eat, but they are now using human
rights laws to claim legal protections and liberties.

Last month a quarrying company took the Scottish environment minister to
court on the grounds that its human rights had been breached. Lafarge
insists that the results of the public inquiry into its plan to dig up a
mountain in South Harris have been unreasonably delayed. The company may
have good reason to complain, but to use human rights law to press its
case sets a frightening precedent.

It is a concept developed in the United States. The 14th amendment to the
constitution was introduced in 1868 with the aim of extending to blacks
the legal protections enjoyed by whites. By 1896 a series of
extraordinary rulings by a corrupt, white and corporate-dominated
judiciary had succeeded in denying these rights to the black people they
were supposed to protect, while granting them instead to corporations.

Firms in the US have argued that regulating their advertisements or
restricting their political donations infringes their "human right" to
"free speech". They have insisted that their right to the "peaceful
enjoyment of possessions" should oblige local authorities to grant them
planning permission, and prevent peaceful protesters from gathering on
their land. At the same time they have helped to ensure that the "social,
economic and cultural" rights, which might have allowed us to challenge
their dominance, remain "aspirational".

The rise of corporate human rights has been accompanied by an erosion of
responsibilities. Limited liability allows firms to shed their
obligations towards their creditors. And while they can use human rights
laws against us, we can't use human rights against them as they were
developed to constrain only the activities of states. As far as the law
goes, corporations are now more human than we are.

While we have been fretting about the power of nanotechnology and
artificial intelligence, our domination by bodies we created but have
lost the means to control has already arrived.

The Guardian Weekly 19-10-2000, page 13