Christian Democrats wrote:I think my proposed clause* would take care of your concern. Under it, member states could impose some reasonable regulations on non-profit entities (the means) "in order to prevent undue, corrupting influence on government by for-profit corporations and other business enterprises" (the end).
I agree, though I would strike the word "undue," remaining idealistic enough to hope that there is no due amount of corruption.
Zone 71 wrote:OOC: So what does this proposal do exactly? From what I can tell, it simply reaffirms previous, active World Assembly legislation and states what member nations can already do.
Some time ago, a long-standing resolution on freedom of expression was repealed. The problem with it was that the term "people" was ruled to include all legal persons i.e. corporations as well as individuals. The old resolution therefore inadvertently prevented the regulation of advertising and other restrictions on corporate behaviour because, although it didn't mean to, it gave corporations the same free speech rights as individuals.
It was replaced by the recent resolution by United Massachusetts, which avoids the problems of its predecessor by explicitly stating that it only concerns the free expression of individuals. A consequence of this is that we're now in a situation where there is no protection for the free expression of organisations. That means governments are currently allowed to legally silence political parties, civil rights groups, environmental campaigns, residents associations, publishing companies etc etc.
This proposal extends to organisations most of the protections already afforded to individuals, but to avoid getting into the same difficulties as the original it seeks to allow governments to regulate advertising and require a degree of corporate honesty and to take steps to limit the influence of corporations on government. In an ideal world I'd simply protect the free speech of the good guys (the civil rights and environmental groups etc) and leave profit making companies unprotected, but as we've been discussing that would allow corporations to set up non-profit subsidiaries or shell companies and do their dirty work through these intermediaries.
The rules say that our proposal cannot contradict UM's resolution, nor rely on it in such a way that it would become nonsensical if UM's resolution were to be repealed. That's why the text has to talk fairly vaguely about "whatever resolutions are currently in force."