Bringing major corporations to book for their crimes

Two new books tell the complex, fascinating and sometimes frustrating tale of attempts to hold multinationals to account for environmental and social crimes

• Book information
• Just Business: Multinational corporations and human rights by John Gerard Ruggie
• Published by: Norton
• Price: ?14.99

• Book information
• Make It a Green Peace! The rise of countercultural environmentalism by Frank Zelko
• Published by: Oxford University Press
• Price: ?22.50

Still no justice, nearly 30 years after the world's worst industrial disaster (Image: Raghu Rai/Magnum)

IT WAS the world's worst industrial accident. More than 3000 people died one winter night in 1984 in the Indian city of Bhopal, poisoned by methyl isocyanate gas belching from an agrochemicals factory owned by US-based Union Carbide. Tens of thousands were disabled. The cause was unambiguous, culpability seemed clear. But how to bring the company to justice?

There was a US parent company, but also an Indian subsidiary. Court cases proliferated in both countries. US judges decreed it was up to the Indian judiciary, but the US government declined to extradite company boss Warren Anderson to face charges there. In the end, the only people convicted were a few lowly Indian managers, who had been given charge of what many said was a defective plant.

The case remains a textbook example of the persistent failure of legal systems to hold multinational corporations to account for their failures. It features in Just Business, John Gerard Ruggie's fascinating account of his journey through the minefield of corporate accountability, on behalf of the UN.

Other examples he discusses include the toxic solvents and child labour used to make fashionable Nike sportswear in the 1990s, and the 60-year battle of the impoverished Ogoni people in Nigeria against Royal Dutch Shell, whose shareholders made billions as the Ogoni forests were poisoned by oil. Then there is Yahoo's widely condemned release of subscriber information to the Chinese authorities, which resulted in a whistle-blowing Chinese journalist receiving a 10-year jail term. Ruggie also points to the existence of child slaves on cocoa farms, recklessly polluting mining companies, and many more corporate villains.

Ruggie found that in each case, there was a failure to manage technology safely, to make proper use of the scientific evidence about toxicity and environmental pollution, or to recognise ethical dilemmas created by new data systems. Those failures were partly due to a global "race to the bottom", as corporations sought to cut costs. In each case, too, national laws seemed incapable of holding the new class of global corporations to account.

Ruggie's task for the UN was not only to try to pin down the issues, but also to find ways to help corporations to recognise that they ultimately had a vested interested in creating and abiding by codes of good citizenship.

Along the way, he devised what are now known as the Ruggie Principles. In essence, these hold that states must protect people against human rights abuses, including environmental abuse, while companies must respect those rights and show due diligence when trading with others, and that those who are harmed must have proper redress.

This is good as far as it goes. But Ruggie recognises that with law mostly constrained by national borders, corporate gunslingers have plenty of places to hide. As jurisprudence falters, public opprobrium may be a more potent weapon. Like capital, it cares little for borders. And while corporations appear strong, their brands ? the crucial interface with their customers ? are uniquely vulnerable to reputational damage. Long before the legal cases over Bhopal, Union Carbide was commercially crippled by the disgust caused by its killing of thousands of Indians. It was eventually bought out by a rival.

These days, to hurry such villains to the gallows, there is a new breed of multinational organisation dedicated to drawing attention to the failings of big corporations. Non-governmental organisations like Global Witness and Greenpeace bring these cases to the court of public opinion.

In Make It a Green Peace!, historian Frank Zelko charts the rise of Greenpeace. It began in the US as a bunch of west-coast hippies who, copies of the I Ching in hand, sailed into nuclear test zones in the Pacific to disrupt whalers. He records its transformation into professional campaigners, using media-savvy PR to wage war on brands they deem responsible for trashing rainforests, releasing toxins or warming the planet.

Early Greenpeace pioneers have written their own entertaining memoirs, but this densely sourced narrative is the definitive independent account, especially of the early years ? and is highly readable. Greenpeace emerges as a kind of green version of the Spanish Inquisition, engaged in crude but effective intimidation of corporate foes. When faced with a media frenzy over their activities, the companies swiftly "find" the road to green salvation.

Of course, the irony is that in the process, Greenpeace, too, has become a brand. It is still tainted, Zelko notes, by some false accusations it made in the 1990s against Shell, when the company ditched a decommissioned oil rig into the Atlantic deeps.

The stakes are high, but the lesson is that when it comes to holding mega-corporations to account, power over global media often trumps national law.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Nowhere to run..."

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