The Community Bill of Rights – Turning Occupation into Lasting Change

The legal system is part of the ‘system’ which Occupy London rightly identifies in its initial statement as both undemocratic and unjust. To remedy this, we must radically reorient our legal structures everywhere, so that they foster meaningful human relationships and the flourishing of life on this planet.  At the moment the legal system, taken as whole, delivers the opposite – it maintains the status quo, which in turn keeps corporations in power and ensures that communities are subordinate.

The Community Bill of Rights (or CBoR for short) is an excellent example of a law that genuinely does give power back to the people and would help foster those meaningful relationships for people and planet.  CBoRs have been adopted by dozens of towns (and a city, Pittsburgh) in the US – they work.  They are pioneered by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a US non-profit law firm. Cicero said “the more laws, the less justice,” so appropriately the CBoR is only a few pages long.

The CBoR is structured into three main parts. The first part sets out the purpose of the law – this states: “[citizens]… recognise that environmental and economic sustainability cannot be achieved if the rights of the municipal majorities are routinely overridden by corporate minorities claiming certain legal powers…”

The second main part sets out the rights of communities.  Some of the most important rights include the right to a locally based economy (which would strengthen communities and encourage local job creation); the right of natural communities and ecosystems to exist and flourish – this is in recognition of the fact that healthy human communities are dependent on healthy non-human communities, and recognises that nature has intrinsic value); the right to water for people and ecosystems and the right to a sustainable food system – both in recognition of the fundamental importance of these for survival. The right to a sustainable food system also includes the right to food free from genetically modified organisms – there are many reasons to support this, just one being that any ‘benefits’ of GM would accrue to a corporate few in the form of profit.

Other important rights include the right to free and fair elections, free from corporate interference; and the right to clean government (including the right to a legislative process free from corporate lobbying and involvement) – both of these rights are particularly apt in light of Occupy London’s focus on the undemocratic and unaccountable local authority, the Corporation of London. If it wasn’t for Occupy London, many people across the capital and the country would not know that corporations vote in the City of London Corporation elections – it is unique in the UK for this.

There are other valuable rights expressed in the CBoR including the right to affordable and renewable energy, right to determine the future of neighbourhoods and more. The overall effect of these rights is to genuinely empower communities. The rights are expressed in the positive.

By contrast, the third main part of the CBoR sets out prohibitions on corporate legal privileges. The effect of these provisions is to take power away from the corporations that are responsible for damaging communities and so these provisions are expressed negatively. ?To illustrate, the first provision in this section reads: “Corporations and other business entities which violate the rights secured by this Community Bill of Rights shall not be deemed to be “persons”… nor possess any other legal rights, privileges, powers, or protections which would interfere with the enforcement of rights enumerated by this Charter.”

If you’re not familiar with legal jargon, this provision may not seem to be saying much. In fact it is radical. A corporation is a legal fiction. It exists as a piece of paper only and yet it has extensive rights including the protection of the European Convention on Human Rights. As Professor Conor Gearty pointed out in the Occupy Law event at Tent City University on 20 February, the most important right in our society is the right to property, which favours corporations, and corporations use their rights both as a sword and a shield against communities and the State. They use their rights as a sword to defeat attempts by the community to prevent them from carrying out harmful activities in the community (as you’ll appreciate if you’ve ever tried to object to that third Tesco on your High Street) and they use their rights as a shield against the State to defeat attempts to regulate them in the public interest. A good example of this is legislation designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. At international, European and national level this has been ineffective because governments capitulate to corporate demands. Lawyers for the corporations, on salaries not much less than bankers, end up writing the legislation which they hand over to civil servants, who more or less end up rubber-stamping the draft, which gets passed into law. The government then say that they have ‘consulted’ because they canvassed the business community.  So, the CBoR stating that corporations will not be recognised as persons if they violate the rights set out in the CBoR is potentially a game changer.  To paraphrase George Monbiot in his book Captive State – corporations are inventions originally designed to serve us – they have now enslaved us. We need to re-examine the role of the corporation from its foundations (is it ever a good idea to confer personhood on corporations?) and have a mechanism revoking personhood, and for exposing the persons behind the corporation, who are generally protected by the law for all their acts of impunity.

I want to progress the idea of the Community Bill of Rights with the support of working groups at Occupy, and others. We can identify a local London authority which may be sympathetic and potentially campaign for the adoption of the CBoR. In doing so, we will highlight the democratic deficit, and more positively, doing this may facilitate democratic renewal. Various people have also expressed an interest in using the CBoR to engage communities during the Occupy London walk beginning in May.  This would be fantastic and I encourage people to get in touch if they would like to support this initiative.

By Melanie Strickland