The Corporate Veil
The Project
The project seeks to identify and analyse to what extent the separate legal
personality of subsidiaries of multinational companies hinders the ability of
victims of human rights/environmental abuses to obtain adequate redress. This is
a major issue that regularly arises in litigation. Practical cases need to be
identified by collaborators of the Essex Business and HR project as the basis
for producing the analysis. Progress on this topic can have a significant impact
on the ability of victims of human rights/environmental abuses to achieve
adequate redress.
The project enables students to learn how to marry major topics in business
law with core issues in human rights. They also benefit from the opportunity to
interact with practitioners and NGOs, and learn about the issues through current
cases. The project is also a core theme of academic interest for students taking
courses in this area.
Progress
The team has been researching the social impact and legal issues involved in
corporate human rights abuses and corporate-led disasters in specific countries
such as Canada, Italy, Japan and Spain. Participants have been preparing briefs
on approaches taken, challenges overcome, and difficulties faced in key
strategic cases. Difficulties encountered included data collection, a lack of
availability of specific cases related to these issues, and differences between
civil and common law particularly in relation to gaining access to full text
transcripts of court decisions in civil law countries. Through this research,
the team is examining and exploring legal arguments to pierce the corporate veil
in the context of Amnesty International’s Niger Delta Project.
Partner Organisation
Supervisor
Professor Sheldon Leader
Coordinator
Ulisses Terto Neto
Student Team
Rebecca Fan, Sarah French, Antonio Gerardi, Wessen Jazrawi, Naomi Kodaira,
Annalisa Pauciullo Genevieve Sauberli, Giovanni Stanghellini, Yu Suzuki, Andrés
Zaragoza
Documents
Due to the confidential nature of the project, documents are not available
to the public at this time