Conditioning The Corporate Person: Integrating Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) Into The Indian Constitutional Framework
- IJLLR Journal
- May 14
- 2 min read
Bavya. B, Dr. Aman Kumar Sharma & Mahesh Sharma, Symbiosis Law School, Pune (SLS-P), Symbiosis Centre for Advanced Legal Studies and Research, Pune, India (SCALSAR), Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India (SIU)
ABSTRACT
The constitutional jurisprudence of the Indians has slowly extended the basic rights assurances to corporations giving them the opportunity to demand assurances of equality, economic freedom and property rights to the Constitution of India. But this expansion of constitutional protection has not been matched by a similar framework of constitutional accountability: corporations are making claim of rights just as they are substantially insulated against any enforceable liability to prevent or remedy the human rights and environmental atrocities that their operations perpetrate. In this paper, the structural accountability gap is identified to be asymmetry and the solution to structural accountability gap is to make it mandatory that the Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) requirements be enforced in the constitutional and corporate regulatory frameworks of India. According to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the French Duty of Vigilance Law, the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the article is a Conditional Corporate Legitimacy Model, under which constitutional rights of corporations are conditionalized on the realization of the HRDD. The model is based on the existing constitutional principles, in particular, on the prolonged right to life provided by Article 21, the Polluter Pays Principle, the Precautionary Principle, and the doctrine of sustainable development, and is associated with the anchors of the legislative reform the Companies Act 2013 and the SEBI sustainability disclosure framework. The article concludes that the constitutional promise of human dignity, social justice and environmental sustainability in India offer sufficient normative reasons to impose proactive due diligence obligations on the corporate persons, and that such omission is a partial and constitutionally flawed evolution of corporate law.
Keywords: corporate personhood, Human Rights Due Diligence, Indian constitutional law, Article 21, fundamental rights, environmental constitutionalism, Companies Act 2013, conditional corporate legitimacy, UN Guiding Principles, HRDD.
