Corporate Accountability

Challenging the systems that allow corporations to exercise power and claim rights without accountability.

Around the world, corporations are gaining power—at the expense of people and the planet. Corporate power has seized substantial control of governments in many countries, including the United States, severely limiting the voices of those whose interests might diverge from those of the elites. Corporations have succeeded in manipulating judicial systems, making it easier to use the courts as tools of repression while frontline communities struggle to seek justice. As communications and advocacy increasingly occur online, corporations and governments have begun to use sophisticated digital tools to conduct surveillance of activists and spread misinformation that undermines social movements. In the United States, corporate lobbies have limited access to courts and remedies for victims of corporate human rights abuses.

With our Cancel Corporate Abuse campaign, EarthRights works alongside communities to use their power and the power of the law to end abusive policies and practices that threaten human dignity and natural resources.

Through community-led organizing and strategic litigation in courts worldwide, we put maximum pressure on some of the worst violators of human and environmental rights, such as Nestle, Cargill, and Chiquita Brands International.

When corporations, governments, and financial institutions get a blank check to violate human and environmental rights, we all pay the price. People lose their lives, and communities lose control over their natural resources. By uniting together, we can put an end to corporate abuse.

GLOBAL GOAL:

Hold corporations accountable for respecting community rights to land and a healthy environment.

CAMPAIGNS AND RELATED WORK

Learn more about our work to hold corporations accountable for abusing human rights and the environment.

Drawing on our own experiences and the work of our colleagues in the nonprofit human rights and environmental communities, we have taken a closer look at what options for justice exist in the United States, and where the barriers lie. We examine the extent to which the United States has become a safe haven for corporate human rights abuses. Learn more.

We use legal strategies and tools to address corporate abuse. See our cases here.

We stand with communities that are speaking out against what they see as land grabs, abuse, and exploitation on the part of investors and project managers in Special Economic Zones. Learn more.

Powerful corporations, governments, and financial instiutions around the world collude to exploit valuable natural resources and the communities that rely on them—and they are rarely held accountable. Our Cancel Corporate Abuse campaign works to hold these bad actors responsible for the harms they create. Learn more.