This essay by Janet Jobson for her honours degree at Rhodes University, Grahamstown in 2006, argues that in light of the extraordinary power and wealth of the contemporary corporation, legislation such as the US' Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) must be protected as one of the last meaningful methods by which corporations can be held to account for violating human rights.
If the Bush government is successful in scuppering the ATCA legislation, one of the last stands of the ordinary citizen has against corporations will have disappeared. This is not to say that every individual citizen has the ability to take cases to court – by and large that is the realm of civil society organisations and coalitions. Rather, the point made here is that in the ‘battle' between the ordinary flesh-and-blood citizen and the corporate dollars-and-euros supercitizen, the ATCA legislation is one of the final weapons available to the public. Removing the ATCA would mean that individuals and coalitions would no longer be able to take direct action against corporations. The state will become the only arbiter between corporate and public interests. In light of the increasing alignment of state and corporate interests, and the erosion of real democracy, it is unlikely that the contemporary state will take the kind of extensive regulatory action required to protect the interests of its own citizens.
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