United Nations and Transnational Corporations: a deadly association

The United Nations is failing in its duty to control the abuses of transnational economic power, argues Alejandro Teitelbaum. The recent report by John Ruggie, special representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights, represents a setback in attempts to establish international control over the activities of transnational corporations.

I. The United Nations Organisation (UN) was created in order to keep the peace and defend human rights and dignity. Some important contributions towards these aims have been made, although the goal that it set itself has never been fully reached.

Over the last decade or so however, with the disruption of the relative balance of international power, the UN has begun to drift in a direction diametrically opposed to its original aims.

We do not wish to address at the moment the role which the Security Council plays in legitimating the imperialist and warmongering policies of the United States and its satellites, for example right now, as they prepare the ground for aggression against Iran.

Instead we want to discuss the way in which various organs of the United Nations system act as instruments of the international economic power embodied in transnational corporations. By this we don’t mean the institutions that are specifically concerned with economic power, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, but rather other bodies whose responsibilities relate to human, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. Lire la suite