Posted April 24, 2009
Authors: Brady,M.
Produced by: Jus Semper Global Alliance (2009)
Available online at: http://www.eldis.org/cf/rdr/?doc=42900&em=230409&sub=corp
This paper presents a proposal for the establishment of a World Transnational Corporation Regulatory Authority (WTNCRA). The WTNCRA will be an autonomous body with a protected budget from the UN and the mandate to carry out investigations at the request of third parties and on its own initiative. The objectives of the WTNCRA are to:
· make corporations accountable to civil society for the impact of their activity as well as governments for regulating business practice
· ensure transnational corporations abide by existing human rights, environmental, labour and other relevant agreements
· accept reports of breaches from appropriate authorities or public petition and if there is a case to answer, bring a prosecution before the International Criminal Court (ICC)
The proposal envisages that:
· the ICC will be empowered to levy fines based on annual turnover on the corporation and to award governments the right to levy punitive tariffs on the home government of the corporation for seeking to gain an unfair competitive advantage by failing to enforce the agreements
· corporations with a turnover and geographic coverage above set minimums will be required to register as “globally incorporated companies” and submit annual independently audited reports of their performance against standards already agreed to in the UN Global Compact
There are however several challenges:
· the ICC’s mandate does not include corporate malfeasance, neither is it recognised by all countries, including the USA, which has the largest number of global corporations
· civil society needs to devise a specific strategy to force governments to agree on expanding the jurisdiction of the ICC to the prosecution of corporate malfeasance and on allowing society to file formal complaints against corporations and against countries refusing to enforce existing agreementThe Cable Guy download