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QUEBEC — Mr. Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada called Tuesday for Canadian multinational corporations to pay more attention to human rights abuses in Third World countries where they operate.
Cataloging a long list of cases where developing countries were accused of harming their populations in order to attract or keep foreign corporations operating within their borders, Judge Binnie urged lawyers with the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association to persuade their employers to show a greater sense of global responsibility.
“Why it is that, although the economic aspects of globalization – trade aspects, labour aspects, the investment aspects, the commercial arbitration aspects – are looked after well, human rights lag as an object of corporate attention?” he asked.
“I believe there is an important role here for Corporate Canada – and I hope a lot of you will do your best to get your clients to put their shoulder to the wheel,” he said.
If controversy and litigation involving human rights abuses abroad has not arrived already for Canadian corporations, it may not be long in coming, says Mr. Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada
“The interactions between the economies of the First World and the economies of the Third World are growing,” he told the corporate lawyers.
“Your people have their act together. The legal system doesn't. Progress is made in a patchwork kind of way. There is no coherent legal structure.”
Judge Binnie, a one-time assistant deputy minister at the federal Department of Justice, had a varied legal career that included corporate and commercial litigation on Bay Street and a one-year stint as an adviser to the government of Tanzania.
He told his audience that if controversy and litigation involving human rights abuses abroad has not arrived already for their employers, it may not be long in coming.
The United Nations estimates there are 77,000 corporations whose business crosses national boundaries, while there is $11-trillion (U.S.) in international trade.
“It is an enormous web of corporate activities across the globe which is not matched by any legal structure,” Judge Binnie said.
“The global economy is divided into all these national jurisdictions that sometimes have a great deal of trouble – and control is required.”
Corporations themselves are often not the culprit in human rights violations, he said.
Rather, it is the nations in whose countries they operate whose enthusiasm for foreign commerce leads them to encourage child labour, environmental degradation or discriminatory practices toward women.
“These countries compete ferociously for investment, they compete for jobs, they compete for ways to improve their standard of living, and they are in no mood to bring down the hammer on companies which carry on in those jurisdictions differently than they do at home,” Judge Binnie said.
“There are people in the countries who are fully supportive, because they are looking for jobs or economic improvement,” he said.
“But if you are a mine or a pipeline, people are going to be displaced – and they are unlikely to get much compensation.”
“So you have internal conflict, which the country inviting in the multinational sometimes represses with more violence than I'm sure the multinational in general regards as acceptable.”
Judge Binnie said some court systems – most notably in California – have bent over backward to prevent corporations from evading their responsibility for human rights abuses or simply sloughing off the blame on their host countries.
At the same time, he noted, some companies have won important courtroom battles against their critics after being tarred with highly publicized allegations of abuses.
“An effective enforcement mechanism operates not just for the protesters, but for the companies so that these allegations can be nailed down and responded to in an effective way,” he said.
Taking action to curtail human rights abuses is also a sound business strategy, Judge Binnie added, since the actions of protest groups can do serious damage to the image of a corporation.
