ECONOMIC JUSTICE ACTIVITY
Economic Justice Action Group of the Friends of the Earth Finland works to correct the injustice maintained by the globalised economy led and determined by the privileged rights of corporations and industrial over-consumption which threaten human rights, Earth's life and its diversity.
We demand human rights and rights and health of Earth's life and its diversity to be secured by enacting in the UN legally binding responsibilities for transnational corporations to respect human rights and the integrity of Earth's ecosystems, climate and environment.
All such rights, powers and competences of commercial activity which can threaten human rights or Earth's environment or diversity of life must be removed from corporations, from the EU policy competences and from the trade and investment agreements.
UN human rights treaties oblige states to ensure that all rights of economic activity comply with economic human rights and respect them as also socially and culturally equal to all. As one tool for this the states could also use UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP).
But as states have neglected their duty to organise the use of UNGP in compliance with their ICESCR and other human rights treaty obligations, currently UNGP is used on the contrary widely to re-define human rights to respect corporate privileges.
Corporations invest now milions to create their 'due diligence' procedures to distortingly reshape and redefine what is meant and understood in public by 'human rights' - as if human rights were something what is best respected and fulfilled by that how money and wares move without restrictions by business which profits corporations.
Economic justice however requires economic activities to sustain life and fulfil economic human rights - not rights and freedoms of dead wares or money - but such rights of life and its diversity which are socially and culturally equal for all.
Economic justice requires rights and obligations of trade, investment and all economic activity to be derived from economic human rights as socially and culturally equal rights for all to adequate food, water, housing, health, work, safe and healthy environment and living and working conditions and other means of subsistence, by which people live.
Economic justice is based on equality of economic human rights between people, between societies and between diverse cultures of economy - between different ways of sustaining life, its dignity and diversity on which it depends.
As an activity is economic in respect to how it sustains life, people's economic rights are rights to what sustains life - based on economic human rights to adequate food, water, housing and living conditions, work, health, culture, etc.
As life gets sustained only in its diversity - like our life also can not continue without life of diverse plants, animals, microbes, etc. - thus just economy needs also justice between diverse living beings in respect to how they need each other to live
The less money and resources of life of others an activity consumes and wastes away in sustaining life in dignity, the more economic the activity just is - to sustain life as adapted to regeneration of Earth's life in its diversity.
And as to invest in something (or in some area) also just is an opposite of consuming it or wasting it away, therefore:
Just economic investments in a land set resources in that land into use which sustains that area's life in its diversity and thus helps to fulfil economic human rights to food, health, work, etc. in socially and culturally equal ways for all.
Rights to economic activity are thus equal rights of all to sustain life in its diversity in ways which fulfil economic human rights with least consumption and waste of money or resources.
Economic justice consists thus of the health of Earth's diverse life being sustained equally for all as health and rights of future life for new generations.
This equality of economic justice is however currently undermined by privileged rights globalised for our commercial industrial consumption and production as maintained by ownership of money and private profit making by corporate business.