Beyond the 100 Acre Wood: in which international human rights law finds new ways to tame global corporate power

The universality of human rights is often treated as a truism: human rights are universal because they belong to all human beings by virtue of their being human; or put the other way around, unless they are universal rights they cannot be human rights.1 This despite the fact that propositions of the kind that all human beings are ‘born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (Article 1 UDHR) have little empirical purchase. Geography plays a decisive role in the global birth lottery and most Northerners happen to live a freer and less unequal life than people in the so-called Global South. What is more, the criteria for membership in the human family are far from settled, with prospective candidates ranging from animals and artificially intelligent machines to corporate beings that claim protection of their ‘human’ rights to privacy, property and so on against the rest of ‘us’.2

Both of these challenges combine in the well-known difficulty of ‘mapping’ humanity’s universality-by-abstraction onto concrete right-bearing subjects that come with a gender,

*Corresponding author. Email: D.H. Augenstein@uvt.nl