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. Though black people eventually reclaimed their legal protections, corporate human rights were never rescinded. Indeed, while they have progressively extended the boundaries of their own humanity, the companies have ensured that ours is ever more restrained. As the solicitor Daniel Bennett has pointed out, article 13 of the European Convention, by which we could have contested the corporations' absolute control of fundamental resources, has been deliberately excluded from our own Human Rights Act. 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 laws 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. The potential consequences are momentous. Governments could find themselves unable to prevent the advertising of tobacco, the dumping of toxic waste or the export of arms to dictatorships. Yet in Britain the public discussion of this issue has so far been confined to the pages of the Stornoway Gazette.