The Human Rights of Companies

This book explores the human rights consequences of the new mercenarism, as channeled through so-called private military and security companies (PMSCs), and offers an overview of the evolution and status quo of both non-legal

This book is one of the first academic works to comprehensively analyse the dilemma concerning global content governance on social media. To date, no single human rights standard exists across all social media platforms, allowing private companies to set their own rules, values and parameters. On the one hand, this normative autonomy raises serious concerns, primarily around whether companies should be permitted to establish the rules governing free speech online. On the other hand, if social media platforms simply adopted international law standards, they would be compelled to operate a choice on which model to follow, and put in place mechanisms to uphold these general standards. This book examines this topic from a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing from the expertise of the authors in law, political science and communication studies.

The capacity to abuse, or in general affect the enjoyment of human, labour and environmental rights has risen with the increased social and economic power that multinational companies wield in the global economy. At the same time, it appears that it is difficult to regulate the activities of multinational companies in such a way that they conform to international human, labour and environmental rights standards.