Civil and Political Rights
A man stands next to a poster advertising US internet search engine Yahoo in a Beijing subway station. © 2006 AFP
This category of rights encompasses rights to personal and political liberties.38 It includes, among others, the right to liberty of the person (including freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention), freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of information, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, the right to property, the right to found a family, and the right to privacy.39 Contrary to the commonly held view that business activities have little to do with civil and political rights, these rights frequently have been affected by companies in a variety of contexts, as shown in various Human Rights Watch reports.
Examples of business impacts on civil and political rights include:
- Employers and transnational labor recruitment agents in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the US have denied workers’ freedom of movement by forcibly confining them and confiscating their passports or other identity papers.40
- Oil companies have not fully and publicly disclosed their payments to the Angolan government, compromising the Angolan public’s right to information and, by helping to entrench undemocratic and unaccountable rule, impeding their right to participation in public life as well. Banks that have provided the Angolan government with oil-backed loans without transparency also have contributed to the problem.41
- A company security force in Indonesia has used intimidation tactics, beat several people, destroyed and stole property, and detained villagers in an effort to silence opposition to the company’s logging activities; such abuses have impeded, among other rights, the villagers’ rights to property, to be free from arbitrary detention, and to exercise their freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.42
- Private security forces hired by commercial farms in South Africa,43 business owners in Guatemala,44 oil companies in Nigeria,45 land developers in Angola,46 and the US government in Iraq have used intimidation and excessive force against local residents.47
- Private security guards in Burundi routinely have held hospital patients against their will in state hospitals until they have provided payment.48
Many company practices impinge on the right to privacy, as shown by the following examples:
- Employers in a variety of industries in Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have targeted individuals who defy gender and cultural norms, interrogated them about their sexual orientation, and often fired them if they answered honestly. Those who managed to retain their jobs frequently have faced serious harassment at the workplace.49
- Employers in the tourism and export processing industries in the Dominican Republic have mandated HIV testing as a condition to obtain or retain a job.50
- Romanian private and public employers have required that job applicants undergo medical examinations (at times including HIV tests) not required by law.51
- Employers in the US have spied on workers, in some cases to unlawfully monitor union activity.52
- Employers in the export processing industry in Guatemala and Mexico have mandated pregnancy testing for prospective workers and as a condition of continued employment.53
Two case studies summarized below provide additional examples of business actions that impede civil and political rights.
Race to the Bottom: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship54
China’s system of Internet censorship and surveillance is the most advanced in the world and is often aided by extensive private sector cooperation. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Skype, seeking access to the lucrative Chinese market, have assisted and reinforced the Chinese government’s system of arbitrary, opaque, and unaccountable political censorship.
As described in an August 2006 Human Rights Watch report, these companies not only have responded to instructions and pressure from Chinese authorities to censor their materials; they also have actively engaged in self-censorship by using their technology to predict the material they believe the Chinese government would want them to censor and then preemptively block users from accessing that material. Through such actions, these companies have been complicit in the Chinese government’s censorship of political and religious information and its monitoring of dissent.
The companies have all accepted at least some Chinese government demands without mounting a meaningful challenge to them. By blocking search content, allowing Chinese officials access to private civilians’ email accounts, and censoring news stories, these companies have assisted the Chinese government in violating individuals’ right to privacy, freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom to receive and impart information.
Information that companies have provided to Chinese authorities has also been used to jail critics; court documents obtained by human rights groups showed that, as of mid-2006, user data handed over by Yahoo! to Chinese law enforcement officials had assisted in the arrest and conviction of at least four people.
The Enron Corporation: Corporate Complicity in Human Rights Violations55
Human rights abuses plagued the Enron Corporation’s Dabhol power plant in India in the 1990s. Local opposition to the Enron project began in 1992 over concerns about corruption and the hasty negotiations of the terms of Enron's investment in its subsidiary, the Dabhol Power Corporation (DPC). Farmers complained that DPC had unfairly acquired their land and had diverted scarce water for its needs. Local activists raised concerns over potential environmental damage. DPC ignored or dismissed such concerns.
Villagers tried various avenues to address their concerns about the project—including direct dialogue with the company and judicial proceedings—without success. The government of Maharashtra state, where the power plant was located, also ignored public complaints. As opposition grew, DPC paid local police for security. Those police forces arrested, harassed, and intimidated critics of the DPC power plant. The company’s critics, including leading Indian environmental activists and village representatives, were subjected to beatings and detentions. In one instance in May 1997, police beat and arrested nearly 180 protesters who were demonstrating peacefully outside the company gates. In addition, contractors working for DPC engaged in a pattern of harassment, intimidation, and violence against individuals opposed to the power project, including by carrying out two attacks and issuing one death threat.
Throughout the controversy, DPC denied any wrongdoing by the company or its contractors and maintained that it bore no responsibility for abuses by police. The company, however, could not have been ignorant of the abuses committed by police whom DPC paid and who were stationed at the site for the sole purpose of dealing with the protests. Police refused to investigate complaints and in several cases actually arrested the victims on trumped-up charges.
38 As typically formulated, this category also encompasses the right to life and those rights pertaining to the physical integrity of the person such as the right to freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (noted above) and the right to freedom from enslavement (noted below). For the purposes of this report, it was more useful to address those rights in relation to other categories.
39 See, for example, right to liberty of the person and right to freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention at UDHR, art. 9, and ICCPR, art. 9(1); right to humane conditions of detention at ICCPR, art. 10; right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association at UDHR, art. 20, and ICCPR, arts. 21, 22; right to freedom of opinion and expression at UDHR, art. 19, and ICCPR, art. 19; right to freedom to receive and impart information at UDHR, art. 19, and ICCPR, art. 19; right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion at UDHR, art. 18, and ICCPR, art. 18; right to privacy at UDHR, art. 12, and ICCPR, art. 17(1); right to personal, home and family life at UDHR, art. 12, and ICCPR, art. 17; right to found a family at UDHR, art. 16, and ICCPR, art. 23; right to property at UDHR, art. 17, ICERD, art. 5(d)(v), CEDAW, art. 15(2), and CMW, art. 15; right to freedom of movement at UDHR, art. 13, and ICCPR, art. 12; and prohibition against slavery and forced labor at UDHR, art. 4, and ICCPR, art. 8. As above, the citations are not exhaustive, and the rights listed here also are reflected in other core instruments.
40 Human Rights Watch, Swept Under the Rug, pp. 73-76; Human Rights Watch, Help Wanted, pp. 5, 26, 32-33, 40-42; Human Rights Watch, Bad Dreams, pp. 48-53, 58, 62, 76, 78; Human Rights Watch, Maid to Order: Ending Abuses against Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore, vol. 17, no. 10(C), December 2005, http://hrw.org/reports/2005/singapore1205/singapore1205wcover.pdf, pp. 42-48; Human Rights Watch, Building Towers, Cheating Workers, pp. 38-39; Human Rights Watch, Hidden in the Home, pp. 12-15.
41 Human Rights Watch, Some Transparency, No Accountability: The Use of Oil Revenue in Angola and Its Impact on Human Rights, vol. 16, no. 1(A), January 2004, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/angola0104/angola0104.pdf, pp. 19, 53-57, 60, 76-78; The Oil Diagnostic in Angola: An Update, March 2001, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/angola/angola-03.pdf, pp. 5-6, 10.
42 Human Rights Watch, Without Remedy, pp. 33-46.
43 Human Rights Watch, Unequal Protection: The State Response to Violent Crimes on South African Farms (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001), http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/safrica2/, pp. 91-96, 106.
44 Human Rights Watch, Guatemala’s Forgotten Children: Police Violence and Abuses in Detention (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997), http://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/c/crd/guatemal977.pdf, pp. 23, 55, see especially, “Abuses by Private Security Forces,” pp. 46-49.
45 Human Rights Watch, The Niger Delta: No Democratic Dividend, vol. 14, no. 7(A), October 2002, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/nigeria3/nigerdelta.pdf, pp. 2-3, 6-7, 12-14, 29-30.
46 Human Rights Watch, “They Pushed Down the Houses”: Forced Evictions and Insecure Land Tenure for Luanda’s Urban Poor, vol. 19, no. 7(A), May 2007, http://hrw.org/reports/2007/angola0507/angola0507web.pdf, pp. 26-27.
47 CHRGJ, Human Rights and First Human Rights Watch, By the Numbers, pp. 6, 16, 20; “Q&A: Private Military Contractors and the Law,” Human Rights Watch questions and answers, October 2, 2005, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/05/05/iraq8547.htm; “US: Failure to Provide Justice for Afghan Victims,” Human Rights Watch news release, February 16, 2007, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/02/15/usint15351.htm.
48 Human Rights Watch, A High Price to Pay: Detention of Poor Patient’s in Burundian Hospitals, vol. 18, no. 8(A), September 2006, http://hrw.org/reports/2006/burundi0906/burundi0906webwcover.pdf, pp. 31-34.
49 Human Rights Watch and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), More Than A Name: Homophobia and its Consequences in Southern Africa (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003), pp. 210-213.
50 Human Rights Watch, A Test of Inequality: Discrimination against Women Living with HIV in the Dominican Republic, vol. 14, no. 4(B), June 2004, http://hrw.org/reports/2004/dr0704/dr0704.pdf, pp. 17-25, 35-39.
51 Human Rights Watch, “Life Doesn’t Wait”: Romania’s Failure to Protect and Support Children and Youth Living with HIV, vol. 18, no. 6(D), August 2006, http://hrw.org/reports/2006/romania0806/, pp. 50-53.
52 Human Rights Watch, Hidden in the Home, pp. 17-18; Human Rights Watch, Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2000), http://hrw.org/reports/pdfs/u/us/uslbr008.pdf, pp. 104-106, 130, 139, 158, 289; Human Rights Watch, Blood, Sweat and Fear, pp. 89-90; Human Rights Watch, Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of US Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association, vol. 19, no. 2(G), May 2007, http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0507/us0507web.pdf, pp. 156-58.
53 Such practices simultaneously impede the right to privacy and the right to found a family. See Human Rights Watch, From the Household to the Factory: Sex Discrimination in the Guatemalan Labor Force (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2002), http://hrw.org/reports/2002/guat/, pp. 28, 42, 88-101; No Guarantees: Sex Discrimination in Mexico’s Maquiladora Sector, vol. 8, no. 6(B), August 1996, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Mexi0896.htm, pp. 16-25, 38-40; A Job or Your Rights: Continued Sex Discrimination in Mexico’s Maquiladora Sector, vol. 10, no. 1(B), December 1998, http://www.hrw.org/reports98/women2, pp. 15-26, 43, 50-51.
54 Human Rights Watch, “Race to the Bottom”: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship, vol. 18, no. 8(C), August 2006, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/china0806web.pdf, pp. 3-8, 13-14, 20-24, 30-72, 106-112.
55 Human Rights Watch, The Enron Corporation, see especially, pp. 1-3, 23-24, 29-45, 54-61, 80-82, 99-104; “Enron: History of Human Rights Abuse in India,” Human Rights Watch news release, January 23, 2002, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2002/01/23/india3704.htm.