Shubhaa Srinivasanpartner in the international and group claims department recently spoke at a conference entitled ‘Transnational Strategic Litigation: Instruments to Defend Human Rights Against Corporations” held in Bogota, Colombia between 15 to 18 September 2010. The conference and subsequent workshop was organised by the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin.
The aim of the conference was to bring together victims of alleged wrongful corporate conduct, lawyers and activists from affected countries as well as international lawyers from Europe and the US in order to jointly explore and develop litigation strategies to hold European transnational corporations who have a presence in Latin America accountable for their corporate conduct in Latin American countries which lead to alleged human rights violations.
Shubhaa talked about the mechanisms available to bring litigation in Europe against European parent companies for alleged harm caused by its operations outside Europe, the complexities of conducting transnational litigation, and the particular challenges faced by victims in bringing such claims and lawyers who act for them.
Conference participants included human rights lawyers from Europe, America and a number of Latin American countries, international NGOs and an impressive array of community representatives, social movements and human rights defenders from Honduras, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil.
Part of the conference involved participating in workshops examining several case studies involving European corporate activity in Latin America in order to build alliances between international lawyers and local human rights defenders and victim communities to develop viable cases to be pursued before courts or tribunals at an international level in the months following the conference. The human rights tackled during the workshop sessions were manifold, including questions relating to land rights, indigenous people’s right to self determination and development, labour rights, freedom of expression and association, the right to life and physical integrity, right to water, food, health and housing.
The conference in Bogota is the first of three regional seminars the ECCHR plans to hold, the next one is planned to take place in Africa the following year and the third, in Asia.
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