No Access to Justice

Global human rights treaties and the United Nations bodies, established in the wake of World War II, were crafted with a view to establishing the accountability of governments to agreed-upon human rights norms. The global governance framework established in that period failed to predict the enormous influence and power, or behavior, of transnational corporations in subsequent decades. During the same postwar period, the Bretton Woods negotiations, establishing a new framework for trade and investment, are characterized by naïve optimism in the virtuous effects of market forces, and thus, failed to establish safeguards to regulate behavior of market actors ¹ (Roosevelt 1945, Collingsworth et al. 1994). Following the drafting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), there was an effort to create an International Trade Organization (ITO), charged with ensuring that trade met specific social aims, including elimination of unfair labor conditions (MacShane 1996: 63–64). Despite its opposition to the ITO charter, the U.S. government consistently articulated a belief that through trade and investment, U.S. corporations would act as ‘ambassadors’ for democratic values. ²