Richard Meeran, a partner in the international and group claims department at specialist personal injury and human rights firm Leigh Day & Co, was recently asked to speak at a conference entitled ‘Conference on legal remedies for human rights abuse involving corporations’ which was held in Geneva on 27 and 28 September. The conference was organised by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and represented the culmination of the initial phase of a project conducted by the ICJ aiming at identifying the most important legal and procedural factors in guaranteeing adequate access to justice and effective remedy for victims of corporate human rights abuse, and identifying the problematic areas that need to be addressed as well as the potential opportunities to be realised. Participants at the conference comprised human rights lawyers, including senior judges, from around the world.
Richard, who has previously given evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights on the subject, spoke on the subject of common themes arising in multinational litigation in common law countries. For the past 16 years Richard’s work has focused on holding multinational parent companies to account for harm caused in developing countries. He has experience of such litigation in the UK and also in Australia and South Africa His cases include the successful claims he made against Cape plc on behalf of 7500 South African miners who contracted asbestos-related diseases. In the mid 1990s, in the first UK case of this type, he represented South African workers who had been poisoned by mercury in a series of successful claims against Thor Chemicals. He is presently acting for 33 indigenous Peruvians in a case against Monterrico Metals PLC and is working in conjunction with the South African Legal Resources Centre in test case litigation in South Africa on behalf of gold miners with silicosis. Richard has also been invited in the past to write an open letter to the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Business and Human Rights on the topic of the development of multinational corporation litigation in South Africa over the past decade, with suggestion for a possible model for the future.
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