Korporacje międzynarodowe jako podmiot (?) międzynarodowego prawa praw człowieka

Abstract

Multinational corporations participate in international relations, whose origins can be traced back to as early as the 17th century. Currently, the consequences of their activity can be seen in vari-ous areas covered by international law, including in international human rights law. On the one hand, there are numerous, fairly well-documented examples of human rights violations. On the other, the view is being expressed increasingly more often regarding the need to extend protection previously available to human beings also to multinational corporations. Therefore, it seems important to deter-mine their position in international human rights law. The doctrine of international law has a number of definitional attempts, but none of them is legally binding. Therefore, only basic differences be-tween a multinational corporation and other forms of economic activity are indicated rather intui-tively. Attribution of subjectivity also faces difficulties — the lack of a legal unambiguous concept and scope of legal-international subjectivity leads to a diversity of doctrinal views. But it cannot be denied that a multinational corporation is granted a certain level of protection in the field of inter-national human rights law — the case law of the European Court of Human Rights is a sufficient example. Equally strong in the doctrine is the thesis that multinational corporations must respect human rights, and in the event of their violation — responsibility towards the victims of these viola-tions. The lack of legally binding solutions in this area means that there are many practical solutions in this area, but none of them are effective enough. The ongoing work under the United Nations to adopt a draft binding act of international law gives some hope for the future. However, it is difficult to say with certainty whether and in what final form it will ever enter into force.