Brian Landers: Corporations are Only Human - At Least in Law
[Brian Landers is the author of "Empires Apart", www.empiresapart.com, a history of American and Russian imperialism, 2009, and has been a Board memeber of private and public sector organizations including Penguin Books, Waterstone's, the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Prison Serrvice.]
The US Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can spend whatever they like on influencing elections. It could happen here too as courts insist that corporations have “human” rights.
Earlier this year the US Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot limit corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections (Citizens United v Federal Election Commission). The Court held that the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as the McCain–Feingold Act, which had tried to limit such funding, infringed corporations' rights to free speech.
The decision was based on a fundamentally flawed theory of the corporation that is widely accepted in the United States and has crept without much debate into English law. The essence of the “natural entity” theory is that corporations are quasi-human and thus have human rights. Only this month three law lords in the case of Veolia and Nottinghamshire County Council unanimously held that provisions of the 1998 Audit Commission Act which allowed “any person interested” to inspect local council contracts violated a corporation's right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The assertion that corporations should have the same rights as human beings would have amazed those first granting charters of incorporation. The original corporations were regarded as dangerous aberrations only to be permitted in exceptional circumstances. Their charters contained all sorts of safeguards, severely limiting what they could do and giving them a finite life. After the introduction of limited liability the need for such safeguards became even greater....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
The US Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can spend whatever they like on influencing elections. It could happen here too as courts insist that corporations have “human” rights.
Earlier this year the US Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot limit corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections (Citizens United v Federal Election Commission). The Court held that the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as the McCain–Feingold Act, which had tried to limit such funding, infringed corporations' rights to free speech.
The decision was based on a fundamentally flawed theory of the corporation that is widely accepted in the United States and has crept without much debate into English law. The essence of the “natural entity” theory is that corporations are quasi-human and thus have human rights. Only this month three law lords in the case of Veolia and Nottinghamshire County Council unanimously held that provisions of the 1998 Audit Commission Act which allowed “any person interested” to inspect local council contracts violated a corporation's right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The assertion that corporations should have the same rights as human beings would have amazed those first granting charters of incorporation. The original corporations were regarded as dangerous aberrations only to be permitted in exceptional circumstances. Their charters contained all sorts of safeguards, severely limiting what they could do and giving them a finite life. After the introduction of limited liability the need for such safeguards became even greater....