This article provides an empirical overview of federal lobbying in Canada, examining lobbying contacts by field and sector from 2011 to 2022. We track shifts in lobbying representation over this period, including across Harper Conservative and Trudeau Liberal administrations. The study reveals the dominance of business interests in lobbying in Canada and a high level of lobbying concentration. By sector, export-oriented industries with high environmental and climatic impacts—namely, agriculture, fossil fuel and manufacturing industries—predominate. With the transition to Trudeau, we find a significant increase in overall rates of lobbying and a modest increase in the ratio of public interest representation. Overall, the lobbying industry is characterized by greater access but unequal voice.

Human rights violations by corporations are widespread and have a broad spectrum: damage to people’s health through pollution, environmental accidents and health and safety failures, forced labour or child labour, underpaid workers, displaced communities, contaminated water sources, use of excessive force, and discrimination, for example by race, gender or sexuality. Corporate violence, resulting from a long history of corporate power and colonialism continues today as corporations have grown into powerful global conglomerates. Through complex and opaque multinational groups and supply chains, use of corporate law concepts such as the corporate veil, as well as other actions such as tax avoidance and lobbying of national and international political institutions, corporate actors remain free to pursue their goals. Despite efforts to combat corporate harm through the development of a business and human rights movement success has been limited and significant gaps remain in the global governance required to ensure protection. This article argues that, similar to a cat and mouse game, corporations find new ways to defend themselves against those seeking to dismantle their power or to prevent human rights infringements. The problem is rooted in structural and systemic inequalities within the international legal framework and in company laws that maintain corporate structures that obstruct the human rights movement’s progress. The current drive towards a more sustainable business agenda requires a just transition, including transformation of global and corporate structures to tackle human rights violations and the inequalities of power and wealth that facilitate such violations.

This article considers ways in which human rights law ought to respond to a growingly urban global order of blurred private—corporate—and state power. Fragmented and dispersed power comes together, in different configurations of public and private, in the cities and towns of the world. For this reason, local government presents the appropriate scale at which to re-conceptualize the operation of international human rights norms, also against private power. This requires engaging not only with the reach and leanings of international human rights standards but also with the manner in which they are rendered applicable, through domestic constitutional law, against state and non-state actors at a local scale. The urbanization of human rights law accordingly also requires a second look at the powers, competencies and responsibilities of urban local government under domestic constitutional law.

The English East India Company's “company-state” lasted 274 years—longer than most states. This research note uses new archival evidence to study the Company as a catalyst in the development of modern state sovereignty. Drawing on the records of 16,740 managerial and shareholder meetings between 1678 and 1795, I find that as the Company grew through wars, its claim to sovereign authority shifted from a privilege delegated by Crown and Parliament to a self-possessed right. This “sovereign awakening” sparked a reckoning within the English state, which had thus far tolerated ambiguity in Company sovereignty based on the early modern shared international understanding of divisible, nonhierarchical layered sovereignty. But self-possessed nonstate sovereignty claimed from the core of the state became too much. State actors responded by anchoring sovereign authority along more hierarchical, indivisible foundations espoused by theorists centuries earlier. The new research makes two contributions. First, it introduces the conceptual dynamic of “war awakens sovereigns” (beyond making states) by entangling entities in peacemaking to defend sovereign claims. Second, it extends arguments about the European switch from layered sovereignty to hierarchical statist forms by situating the Company's sovereign evolution in this transformation. Ultimately, this study enables fuller historicization of both nonstate authority and the social construction of sovereignty in international politics.

This paper presents an original framework designed to systematize understanding of corporate power over human rights. The framework disaggregates four sites of this power: corporations have direct power over individuals’ human rights, power over the materialities of human rights, power over institutions governing human rights, and power over knowledge around human rights. This disaggregation is derived primarily from the work of Barnett and Duvall and focuses on the effects of corporate activity rather than the Weberian understanding of power as the ability to achieve desired outcomes. The framework captures a broad set of corporate acts based on their (potential) harm to human rights. It is argued that understanding business and human rights through the lens of power can help to advance a more comprehensive account of business impacts on human rights.

This article looks at what anarchism has to offer in debates concerning health and healthcare. I present the case that anarchism’s interest in supporting the poor, sick, and marginalized, and rejection of state and corporate power, places it in a good position to offer creative ways to address health problems. I maintain that anarchistic values of autonomy, responsibility, solidarity, and community are central to this endeavor. Rather than presenting a case that follows one particular anarchist theory, my main goal is to raise issues and initiate debate in this underresearched field in mainstream bioethics.

Increasingly, global businesses are confronted with the question of complicity in human rights violations committed by abusive host governments. This contribution specifically looks at silent complicity and the way it challenges conventional interpretations of corporate responsibility. Silent complicity implies that corporations have moral obligations that reach beyond the negative realm of doing no harm. Essentially, it implies that corporations have a moral responsibility to help protect human rights by putting pressure on perpetrating host governments involved in human rights abuses. This is a controversial claim, which this contribution proposes to analyze with a view to understanding and determining the underlying conditions that need to be met in order for moral agents to be said to have such responsibilities in the category of the duty to protect human rights.