What are rights worth?

How much do you think human rights are worth? How would you value your right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as recognised in international law? Do you have a right to protest peacefully against something that you think, based on sound science, will cause irreparable harm to people and the environment? What is the right of a country to take a decision through a democratic process of popular vote? Imaging trying to develop some ranking of human rights, with perhaps the right to life at the top.

A new answer to these questions is now emerging through trade agreements and laws carefully crafted over decades by proponents of a neoliberal economy that place the corporate right to profits above all of these other rights for which the value is not so easily calculated.

A couple of recent examples from The Guardian newspaper illustrate how far this has now gone in very concrete ways. The environmental defender Greenpeace has just been condemned in a U.S. court in North Dakota to pay at least $660 million dollars to an oil pipeline company for peacefully protesting the construction of an oil pipeline on indigenous lands. This represents not just the money the company invested in the construction project, but all the profits that it had anticipated from the operation of the pipeline over its lifetime. Protest itself was ruled to be defamation of the pipeline company, which could add additional penalties. These cases are used by companies to silence protest by imposing the high cost of a legal defence even if the case is lost.

While fossil fuel companies (and states) deny any responsibility for the damage they have done over many decades to the land, waters and climate under the polluter-pays principle, their right to maximum profits is now recognised by laws and the courts.

The other example takes this right to profits to another level. The government of Greenland is being sued under an obscure Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) agreement for $11 billion, nine times its annual budget, for blocking a company from mining for rare earth minerals that would have produced incidental uranium pollution of the surrounding land and waters, threatening local health and livelihoods. The local inhabitants protested, it became an election issue, the winning party was against the project, and the government refused the mining permit. The arbitration tribunal risks deciding that, if the project cannot go ahead, the government must compensate the company for all the profits it would have made over the life of the mine, as estimated by the company.

There is now a whole new set of legal practices, or litigation finance investors, that are making enormous profits from such cases, in which they offer to pay all the legal fees for taking a case to court in return for a share of the winnings if the case is successful. ISDS cases have required government pay-outs to oil companies of $84 billion, and across all industries of $120 billion, since 1976.

While I hesitate to suggest the logical conclusion to which this process can lead, for fear that it will give some lawyers new ideas, imagine how much signing a peace treaty would be worth to the arms industry if they could sue the governments concerned for the loss of their profits had the war continued.

The right for wealthy investors to imagined future profits is now considered more sacred than human or environmental rights or the considered decisions of democratic governments. What can we do to push back against such unethical and immoral practices?

SOURCES: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/20/greenpeace-energy-t…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/05/greenland-mining-en…