PHM-Exch> EU double agenda on globalisation

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: David G Legge <dlegge at phmovement.org>


Flues, F. and A. v. Schaik (2018). "The EU’s double agenda on
globalisation: Corporate rights vs people’s rights." Retrieved 2 Feb, 2019,
from
http://www.foeeurope.org/sites/default/files/corporate_accountability/2018/un_treaty_report_v5_screen.pdf.


The last decades of globalisation have seen corporations expanding across
the globe in search for new markets, cheaper labour and lower environmental
standards. As economies become more and more intertwined, companies
increasingly operate outside their country of origin, often making use of
factories and offices in multiple countries in order to assemble a single
product.

The main beneficiaries of this development are transnational corporations
(TNCs), which have seen their share of profits as a part of global GDP
increase by 30% between 1980 and 2013 – thereby appropriating over the
years an ever-greater share of the wealth produced around the globe. As a
result of this process, inequality has risen, large-scale environmental
destruction has followed in the wake of the growing trade in commodities
such as palm oil or soy, and labour conditions in factories assembling
consumer goods and clothes have, in many cases, become shockingly poor.
These negative impacts of globalisation are felt particularly hard by
people in developing countries.

This expansion of international commerce and the increasing profits reaped
from it by corporations have been aided by agreements that facilitate
cross-border trade and investment. These agreements enable companies to
move their activities to wherever they can maximise their returns, and
provide them with extraordinary safeguards if government interventions
affect what they consider to be their future profit. These agreements also
diminish the ability of governments to regulate corporate activities and
can therefore hinder their ability to fulfil their human rights obligations
to their own citizens.

While trade and investment agreements provide corporations with
extraordinary rights that enable them to operate across the globe,
companies do not have any binding international obligations regulating
their conduct. Communities and workers who are harmed by their operations
do not have recourse to an international mechanism through which to hold
them accountable. Concurrently, people who resist large-scale projects,
such as those carried out by the extractive industry, are increasingly
being intimidated, harassed and even killed. In 2017, nearly four human
rights and environmental defenders were killed per week, with companies and
state security forces often working closely together.

These systematic human rights violations linked to business operations
highlight the need for an international grievance mechanism, especially as
affected people often cannot rely on their governments to protect their
rights. While a number of guidelines and codes of conduct exist, such as
the OECD guidelines for multinational companies and the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human Rights, these are voluntary and have been
rather ineffective in preventing corporate human rights abuses and
environmental destruction. Social movements, activists, trade unions and
affected people have long been calling for a binding instrument that would
make it possible for affected people to hold companies directly responsible
for violating human rights.

The European Union and its Member States are some of the most important
actors when it comes to shaping globalisation. This briefing explores the
double role the EU plays in this process: spinning a web of treaties that
give corporations extraordinary powers while hindering efforts to hold
these very same companies accountable. This double agenda is exemplified by
the EU’s actions in two areas: its reluctance to support binding and
enforceable rights for citizens through an UN Treaty on Business and Human
Rights, while at the same time expanding and entrenching a system of
legally binding and enforceable investor rights and privileges that grants
corporations extraordinary power over governments and communities.
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