Challenging corporate power and rights has never been so important

Helena Paul

Climate change and biodiversity destruction are moving faster than we ever thought possible, with deadly implications for future generations, while inequality, injustice, conflict, disease and hunger are constantly increasing. Our governments continually fail to take action – and corporations grow ever richer and more powerful. A number are richer than states and operate worldwide through very long, often secretive supply chains. And over time they have acquired rights that many of us are not aware of.

So if we want real change – and a world where future generations of all life, not just human beings, can live in peace with equal rights and justice for all – we have to tackle corporate rights, powers, structures and impunity. This requires action from as many people as possible, since governments seem unable to act effectively for us and for the planet. This article is an attempt to examine these issues.

What is a corporation?

The first corporations in the UK were charities, i.e. hospitals and schools. They were not-for-profit organisations, ‘incorporated’ (literally given a body) to protect them over the long term, beyond the life-span of those involved, in the public interest.  This practice of incorporation has continued to this day, and it means that the incorporated entity is a legal entity or person, separate from its owners. This makes it able to enter contracts and own assets in its own name, which also provides limited liability for its owners in the event of its collapse, as later confirmed in law (see below). 

In the year 1600 a new trade association, the East India Company, was granted a charter by Elizabeth 1 of England. The role of a trade association was to develop and manage the trade carried out by its members. During the course of the 17^th century, the members of the association started to put their stock together, gradually becoming a partnership that held all the stock jointly. The members then decided to sell all their stock to the East India Company, receiving a share instead. Thereafter the company traded in its own name, distributing the profits to its ‘shareholders’.  A small group of beneficiaries was thus able to establish a key aspect of the for-profit corporation without consultation with anyone. Over the next  century, a vast number of such trading companies were established, often to exploit particular regions of colonial empires, sometimes in competition with each other, eg: the Hudson Bay Company.¹ 

It was not clear at the time what the long-term consequences of this process of ‘incorporation’ and the creation of powerful and potentially immortal entities, separate from their shareholders and directors, with limited liability and which later acquired many of the rights of human beings, might be.

Limited Liability

• In 1855 the UK passed an act limiting the liability of a corporation if it cannot pay its debts or collapses, expressed in the word limited or ltd. This favours shareholders over employees or, in the case of banks, over people with savings. Thus shareholders will only lose their own money and bear no wider responsibility for damage done.
• Corporations claim that they cannot be held liable for the actions of companies in which they invest or which carry out work for them (subsidiaries). However, in two key recent cases (Vedanta in Zambia and then Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria) the parent company was considered to have a duty of care regarding the actions of its subsidiary, which potentially sets a useful precedent for future cases.²  
• Some corporations have agreed to pay compensation without accepting liability for their actions.³ 

Legal Personhood now means corporations have human rights

The process of incorporation creates a ‘legal person’ which is distinct from its owners. These legal persons later acquired human rights, under the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948, which enables them to exercise freedom of speech (i.e. advertise and lobby). These activities continue to expand massively worldwide. 

But it is extremely difficult for people to bring cases against corporations for human rights violations. Work is slowly building to make it easier; however, it remains a very complex, risky, costly and lengthy business. 

For example communities have been struggling for 50 years to gain compensation from Shell for its destructive extraction activities in Nigeria. In June 2025 the UK High Court ruled that Shell’s claim that communities could not claim damages more than 5 years after the harm was caused was not acceptable and the judge said: “a new cause of action will arise each day that oil remains on a claimant’s land”⁴ 

Another example is that after the collapse of two mining dams in Brazil in 2015, the case against the companies involved (BHP and Vale) has still not begun⁵.

Corporate impunity

Directors of Corporations, shareholders and other personnel can knowingly cause harm to the public in the pursuit of profit, because the Corporate form – legal personhood (see above) – usually protects them from personal responsibility for their actions. This is called the corporate veil. However, they may become liable if they act in a way that threatens or compromises the company, e.g.: they commit fraud or steal company funds – or if they are considered to have set up the company to conceal or enable fraudulent activities. Under these circumstances the veil may be ‘pierced’ and they could be charged. 

It is important to understand that activities by the company that harm the planet, its climate, biodiversity or people in general are not included here and that the ‘piercing of the veil’ is a rare occurrence.  This means that shareholders, directors and other personnel can knowingly invest in activities that damage the planet without being held responsible.

Taking the corporations themselves to court for human rights violations is complex, costly and takes years – see above. 

Potential immortality and the ability to multiply themselves…

• Unlike human persons, the corporation is also potentially immortal, until actually closed down. 
• Directors of corporations on behalf of that corporation can set up shell companies or subsidiaries that have no assets, employees or business operations. These shell companies are separate entities for whose actions, eg: carrying out the exploitation from which the parent company benefits, the parent corporation is not liable.⁶) However, in certain cases major efforts have been made to show that in fact the parent company exercised considerable control over the subsidiary (see the Vedanta case and the Okpabi case.⁷)  
• Tax havens have been created to avoid paying taxes and to conceal the identity of those involved and their (often complex) interrelations. They are another issue that needs to be tackled, but obviously the rich elites and global corporations oppose this.⁸  

Many corporations are richer – and stronger – than states.  

In 2018, according to Global Justice Now, 69 out of the 100 highest earning entities on the planet were corporations, not governments. Walmart, Apple and Shell all accrued more wealth than Russia, Belgium, Sweden.⁹ At the bottom of the chart, from 566-724 are 158 countries…

This signals that we urgently need change. But since the majority of governments are weaker than the biggest corporations and heavily in debt, they rely on those companies to provide vital funds – in return, e.g.: for permission to exploit their resources – people, minerals, lands and forests. Rich countries such as the UK rely on corporations for tax income, even though those corporations often pay less than they should. Their wealth, their advertising and lobbying power and their impunity, as well as their capacity to manipulate legal systems, means that they have undue influence over our governments – and over us. Pension funds (in which millions of us are involved whether we are aware of that or not) also invest heavily in corporations, especially the so-called blue chip companies such as Apple, Boeing, Caterpillar, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Verizon. However, most people are not really aware of this¹⁰. 

Corporations and their supporters have extended their powers to challenge governments

Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS)

Created in the 1960s to protect former colonizers’ property assets from newly independent states¹¹, these are heavily weighted in favour of the corporations. Only corporations can bring cases, not states – and they can bring them:

1. Against states that do not want to allow them to exploit resources on their land:

• For example, the UK company Rockhopper brought a case against Italy in 2017 for refusing to allow oil exploitation in the Adriatic Sea.¹² It  claimed $350 million dollars to cover not just its exploration costs, but also what it claims to be ‘lost profits’. The company’s legal costs are fully funded by UK litigation funder Harbour and the litigation is based on the Energy Charter Treaty, even though Italy quit that Treaty before the case was brought. However, there is often a ‘zombie’ clause in investment agreements that allows corporations to sue states for up to 20 years after that state withdraws from the agreement.  In August 2022, the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes awarded Rockhopper 185 million EUR plus interest, a total of 240 million EUR.¹³

       B. Against states that accuse them of causing damage: 

• Ecuador sued Texaco for damaging its rainforests while extracting oil. Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, counter-sued Ecuador for damage to its reputation. To date, after a long and complex process, Chevron has paid nothing for the damage done, rejecting the judgment of the court in Ecuador that Chevron should pay 9 billion USD, claiming fraud and corruption, a decision then upheld by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. Texaco did a minor clean-up in Lago Agrio, widely recognised as completely inadequate. But as noted above it is claimed by Chevron that the process carried out in Ecuador against Chevron was completely corrupt.¹⁴ 

It is therefore clear that action needs to be taken to deal with the fact that the ISDS process favours corporations, not countries or people, and major reforms should be part of any project to reduce the power of corporations – and that of the World Bank whose Executive Directors set up ICSID (The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes) in 1966 to promote investment. ¹⁵

Problems with the  legal profession

The imbalance of power between the corporation and the people affected by its actions also extends to the legal profession, because corporations can afford to hire the most formidable lawyers for huge fees. Such lawyers, who are often specialists in these cases, may pay more attention to the use/intricacies of law for the benefit of their employer than to matters of justice and may therefore deny justice to claimants. 

Corporations promote endless growth – and citizens are seen by them as CONSUMERS

The growth economy is based on ever-increasing extraction, exploitation and destruction of planetary resources vital for life: soils, fresh water, plants and animals, forests and people – plus ever more waste and pollution of the biosphere. It also drives climate change whose impacts we have seen ever more clearly in the last few years.

• It benefits the rich: investors, directors etc  and exploits the poor between and within countries around the world, often ably assisted by eg: the World Bank.
• People are reduced to consumers of profitable corporate products, promoted by ever more insistent and invasive advertising plus the influence of social media with damaging impacts on human  health  e.g.: addictive foods, tobacco and activities such as online gambling and obsessive attachment to mobile phones.
• Governments will not act to prevent this damage because they are in debt (poor countries) or depend on corporations for investment and income – taxes received etc – and all governments experience ever increasing corporate pressure, eg: lobbying¹⁶. 
• Human beings have already breached several planetary boundaries which means we are putting far too great a strain on ecosystems and the climate, as we can clearly see from the increasing storms, floods, droughts and fires around the world, with major impacts on people and agriculture, plus potential catastrophes such as the melting of polar icecaps and the possible collapse, eg: of the Gulf Stream that warms Europe, which may be imminent.

Holding Corporations Accountable

Work is very slowly starting to set useful legal precedents for holding corporations accountable for their actions. However, we do not have the luxury of time to wait because of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss being caused by corporations and the economic growth model. Therefore we urgently need to address the structure and rights of the corporation, the role and responsibilities of its directors and shareholders, their rights and their relationship with the state and with the public. 

It is becoming ever more clear that ‘economic growth’ is not possible without continuing the destruction of the planetary systems we depend on for our lives. So how do we change this economic model we currently live by – something that both governments and corporations will strongly oppose? It is now more urgent than ever to ask: how do we make real change? How do we take back power from the corporates and their captive governments? What does this require of us – we the people – citizens, voters, ‘consumers’…?

Two new developments we must use in order to make the changes we need:

1. The Human Right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment

The recent UN Decision on The Human Right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment provides a real opportunity for change but only if it is strongly embraced by all governments, including the most powerful,  and enforced on corporations. The document itself is not legally enforceable, but many nations have committed to it and it marks an opportunity that we must collectively use to the full, for the sake of current and future generations of all life. First it needs to be defined: it has to mean an end to the wanton pollution of planetary ecosystems with human generated waste and extractive activities. This means moving towards making all ecosystems sustainable, able to fully maintain themselves without degradation. 

Secondly, it has to be accompanied by a universal commitment to enabling or compelling everyone to take only what they need, so that those who currently do not have enough can do so. This also means ensuring that all ecosystems are able to flourish, something that rapidly accelerating climate change and ongoing biodiversity destruction makes ever more of a challenge. 

The words are easy to say and even support, but the actions needed require urgent, fundamental, often difficult and even painful changes to the way many of us — especially in the global north – live, and the path we are currently on, based on the mantra of ‘economic growth’. Above all this work requires strong cooperation at all levels, from regional and national governments to local community and territory level. And it means genuine cooperation and generosity of spirit between all these levels, including the abandonment of the sense of entitlement that underpins the actions of so many people in the global north. Here Indigenous Peoples and local communities can teach us all a great deal about how to make peace with the planet and cooperate with each other in order to rebuild healthy environments for communities of all life, human and non-human. We should not forget that in the Amazon region, the areas where primary forests flourish most are indigenous territories¹⁷. 

2. The rights of non-human entities such as forests and rivers

At this point it is important to reflect on work, for example, to establish the rights of rivers, now recognised in several regions. The appreciation of the rights of non-human entities such as rivers is a crucial part of planetary repair – and reparations – if these are to be meaningful. If only human beings have rights (recognising that millions have them in concept alone) then this enables destruction of non-human life in the short-term interests of some humans to continue unabated. 

For example, Ecuador has taken several decisions that move towards the recognition of the rights of non-human persons. In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that mining in the Los Cedros Protected Forest is a violation of the constitutional rights of nature and is therefore prohibited in the forest. The Court also declared that the application of the constitutional rights of nature is not limited to protected areas, such as Los Cedros. Rather, as with any constitutional right, it applies to the entire territory of the country.¹⁸ The country’s Constitutional Court issued a landmark judgment that recognized Los Cedros (in Ecuador) as both a legal person and a rights-bearing entity — and ruled that the proposed mining projects would violate those rights.¹⁹ The court’s judgment was both philosophically radical and legally powerful. The mining companies were required to remedy the damage they had caused and then quit the area. Apparently they were gone within 10 days. 

In Peru, the rights of rivers – much challenged – have been recognised in one or two key legal decisions, for example, regarding the Marañón and the Indigenous People who brought the case. In the ruling, the judge of the Mixed Court of Nauta recognized the intrinsic value of the Marañón River, codifying a series of rights, among them: the right to exist; the right to ecological flow; the right of restoration; the right to be free of pollution; the right to exercise its essential functions within the ecosystem; and the right to representation. The court also went further, to name the Peruvian government and the Indigenous organizations as guardians, defenders and representatives of the Marañón River and its tributaries.²⁰

Ideally we should find a way of recognising the rights of all elements of ecosystems – including those that we might consider to be ‘pests’ but which may also play a critical role in ecosystems. For example, wasps, which are crucial pest controllers among many other functions of their thousands of species.²¹ It also means that we should address the introduction of species that do not belong in a particular ecosystem (invasive alien species) and which can cause major harms to it. We should also realise that if we were trying to live as if the planet and its non-human inhabitants also had rights, we would have to make immediate changes to our expectations and curb our extractive activities. This is a major challenge, since we have been persuaded that major inequalities and injustices between us are acceptable and even desirable, in order to demonstrate the superiority of the wealthiest and most powerful. We also exploit the planet and other life forms in order to achieve profits and returns to shareholders, government funds and wealth for the few, while increasing the current enormous and widening gaps between rich and poor, north and south, and, all too often, between men and women.

Experience shows that human beings are easily trapped in structures that may arise almost randomly or be created by a small group to serve their interests – like the rules of corporations or the current, widespread system of so-called party democracies with votes every few years as the sole right of the people…or social media. Once established they are very difficult to change because of the vested interests of those who benefit, and the unwillingness of governments to take action – especially on issues from which they benefit.

More true than ever?

In 1924 Edward Bernays wrote Propaganda, where he said: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

This rather chilling quote from just over a century ago reminds us that we are indeed being manipulated, at all levels, with ever-increasing power and impunity. This manipulation, apparently invisible to many, plus our failure to question it, is leading to the accelerating destruction of the planetary life support systems on which we all depend.  We have seen this all too clearly during 2025, with storms, droughts, floods, fires, heat waves, sea level rise, loss of food production, and negative impacts on many species and ecosystems. It means that warnings about climate change and biodiversity loss, and the impacts on ecosystems everywhere, whether in oceans or on land, are not being heeded. 

This has to change, otherwise future generations of humans and all life are under threat and those born now will find themselves living in an increasingly unliveable world. We must address this, but we need the collective will to do so and we need it now. We urgently need to challenge our structures and systems, such as corporations and their client governments, the structures we have enslaved ourselves to. This is not easy. It requires immense dedication, vision, compassion, collective, cooperative action and profound changes in human behaviour. 

We must also challenge the deep human tendency to see those who are different from them in language, culture, skin colour… as ‘The Other’, sometimes defining themselves as the opposite of what they believe ‘the other’ to be… We urgently need to change this and come together across the usual divides, whether geographical or cultural, and see them rather in the same way as borders, often drawn on maps by colonial powers to divide up the spoils of their wars and conquests, without reflecting geography or cultures. It can also affect the way men and women perceive each other. We have to move beyond this way of seeing ourselves and the world and find new ways of governing ourselves and working together to create new structures. We also need to challenge the sense of ‘entitlement’ encouraged by corporate interests in particular – that we have a right – even a duty – to consume as much as possible, so generating profits – and the huge amount of waste that is contaminating the planet. We also have to challenge the multitude of addictive distractions invented to absorb us so that we do not notice what is happening around us – social media, influencers, virtual worlds, avatars, games, gambling … 

Above all we can’t leave all this to ‘someone else’ to do. It has to be a collective exercise of vision, dedication and compassion, a planetary approach to a planetary crisis, where one species has become dangerously dominant and has profoundly polluted their only unique and extraordinary home to levels that we do not yet fully appreciate. 

So this is just one more call to action – and at the same time I can’t help wondering if out there in the universe, there may be other planets that have suffered or are suffering a similar fate – destruction of their capacity to support life and ecosystems by the actions of a dominant species in pursuit of its own immediate interests.

Helena Paul is co-director of EcoNexus, founded in 2000, and has participated in meetings of the UN Conventions on Climate Change and Biological Diversity as well as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Since 1988 she has worked on indigenous peoples’ territorial and cultural rights; tropical forests; oil exploitation in the tropics; biodiversity including agricultural biodiversity; agriculture and climate change, especially bioenergy; patents on life; genetic engineering (GE); synthetic biology including genome editing; geoengineering; land-grabbing; food sovereignty; and corporate power. She has written numerous reports, papers and briefings, and co-wrote: Hungry Corporations, Transnational Biotech Companies Colonise the Food Chain, published by Zed Books.

References

1.  See: Daniel Bennett with Helena Paul: for Programme on Corporations, Law and Democracy – Guest Paper – Original paper from 1998 https://www.econexus.info/publication/who-is-in-charge

2.  See: https://www.marsh.com/uk/services/financial-professional-liability/insights/parent-company-liability-for-the-acts-of-its-subsidiaries.html  

3.  For example, see: https://www.corpwatch.org/article/burma-total-pay-burmese-compensation 

4.  See: https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2025-news/high-court-trial-finds-shell-plc-and-its-former-nigerian-subsidiary-can-be-held-legally-responsible-for-legacy-oil-pollution-in-nigeria/#:~:text=The%20High%20Court%20has%20ruled,of%20two%20communities%20in%20Nigeria

5.  https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/bhp-vale-lawsuit-re-dam-collapse-in-brazil-filed-in-the-uk/ ) 

6.  For example, see the cautionary note in this press release: https://totalenergies.com/media/news/press-releases/total-has-successfully-issued-hybrid-bonds-finance-its-development  

7.  https://www.marsh.com/uk/services/financial-professional-liability/insights/parent-company-liability-for-the-acts-of-its-subsidiaries.html 

8.  https://taxjustice.net/faq/how-can-we-stop-tax-havens/ 

9.  See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Jdgaz_qGg5o0m_6NCU_L9otur2x1Y5NgbHL26c4rQM/edit#gid=1364122473 

10.  Also see: (For the 20 largest companies by market capitalisation in 2023: https://www.fool.com/research/largest-companies-by-market-cap/ ) 

11.   https://isds.bilaterals.org/the-basics

12. https://10isdsstories.org/cases/case9/

13.  https://isds.bilaterals.org/?polluter-doesn-t-pay-the 

14.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkrauss/2018/09/16/justice-delayed-but-not-denied-corrupt-ecuadorean-process-fails-in-international-arbitration/#1def1b071698 

15.  See also https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/110788/html/  

16.  https://corporateeurope.org/en/2023/09/lobbying-power-amazon-google-and-co-continues-grow 

17.  See https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/indigenous-solution-deforestation-amazon 

18.  See: https://ecojurisprudence.org/initiatives/los-cedros/ 

19.  https://ecojurisprudence.org/initiatives/los-cedros/ 

20.  https://www.internationalrivers.org/news/landmark-ruling-the-peruvian-court-of-nauta-recognizes-the-rights-of-the-maranon-river-and-the-indigenous-communities-as-its-guardians/ 

 21.  See: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-do-wasps-do.html