Challenging Corporate 'Humanity

Legal Disembodiment, Embodiment and Human Rights

Bibliographic Data

ID6068558
AuthorsAnna Grear (0000-0003-2993-1370, University of the West of England, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume7
Issue3
Pages511-543
Publication date2007-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHuman Rights Law Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1461-7781 • E-ISSN: 1744-1021
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hrlr/ngm013
OpenAlexW2104511308
LanguageEN
Citations received23

This article interrogates the corporate use of human rights discourse. It does so in light of concern surrounding corporate distortion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) paradigm, 1 and in light of the fact that corporations can claim shelter under human rights documents, particularly—as recently discussed by Emberland 2 —the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The author offers a critical exploration of corporate human rights claims (and some arguments advanced in their favour), and identifies the phenomenon of legal disembodiment (or ‘quasi-disembodiment’), linking it to both a genealogical account of human rights and the nature of liberal legal personality. This reading of human rights genealogy invites the reader to focus on a series of paradoxes surrounding human rights, including their nature as a form of sacral construct, and locates human rights at an entrenched and challenging interface between historical and contemporary patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Quasi-disembodiment emerges from the analysis as a key conceptual conduit for the legal reception of corporate human rights claims. Linking the ECHR to the liberal human rights tradition, the author suggests that notwithstanding judicial protection of corporations as beneficiaries of ECHR protection, it remains essential to engage in a normative critique of the very notion of corporate human rights. Beneath human rights law (and the related closures of legal discourse) it is possible to trace a human rights-oriented critique that adopts human embodiment (and its quintessential link with human vulnerability) as the ethical foundation of human rights. 3 Emphasising embodied vulnerability as the foundation of human rights yields a significant and ethically relevant distinction between corporations and human beings—a distinction with intriguing possibilities for the future theorisation of human rights—and one that arguably problematises the corporate use of human rights discourse.

Fundamental rights · Human rights · International human rights law · Law and economics · Political science · Reservation of rights · Right to property · Rights of Nature · Sociology · Corporate Law and Human Rights · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Political Philosophy and Ethics

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