The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has recently delivered a judgment in a case in which a Spanish citizen requested Google to remove a link to a page containing personal data. The CJEU ruled in favor of the Spaniard and found that such requests are justified when the information provided is inaccurate, irrelevant, inappropriate or excessive. The Court also explained that although Google's servers are not in the EU, EU law does apply to the activities Google is carrying out here.

This judgment has multiple consequences: on one hand, it protects the right to privacy; on the other hand, it opens up the possibility of infringing upon the freedom of expression and the free access to information. The ruling also brings up a wider question, that of the responsibilities corporations have regarding human rights. What happens to human rights when corporations operate in countries where human rights are either not guaranteed through legislation or are not respected in practice? An example of such a situation is that of factories of large corporations, factories that are spread across the globe and where working conditions are often similar to slavery.

The human rights movement is, at its roots, a movement against oppression and abuse of power. Human rights provide citizens with a shield against the abusive exercise of state power and establish limits that states cannot exceed, and which they must protect. Thus, states are traditionally the ones required to respect, fulfill and protect human rights, to provide a legal framework in which human rights are protected and to sanction abuses and human rights violations.

Lately, however, international law envisages a series of developments that may change the paradigm of identifying the state as the sole guarantor of fundamental rights. As corporations, especially transnational ones, become increasingly more powerful, a question arises: should corporations be given more responsibilities, and are additional safeguards necessary to ensure that they do not commit abuses of power and do not violate human rights?

This issue was discussed at the United Nations in June 2014, when the Human Rights Council (HRC) concluded its 26th session, during which it adopted 34 texts. One of these texts was resolution A/HRC/26/L.22/Rev.1, by which the HRC decided to establish a long-awaited intergovernmental working group. This working group has the clear mandate to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.

Currently, the reference document on corporations' human rights obligations is a manual of principles also developed by the UN. This manual is, however, limited to general recommendations requiring companies to respect human rights throughout their work.

The recent resolution adopted by the HRC marks another step in determining the legal statute of corporations. The regulation of their activities has been exceeding the field of pure commercial law for quite a long time now. For example, in Romania, criminal law has applied to enterprises since 2006; such legal persons (other than the state and public authorities) can commit crimes and may be held criminally liable. Corporations can even have capital punishment applied to them in the form of forced dissolution.

Corporations can also be subjects of rights. An interesting case in this respect comes from the U.S., where the Supreme Court of the United States extended the applicability of freedom to religion to the activities of an enterprise (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby). More specifically, the ruling held that a company can get, on account of religious beliefs, an exemption from subsidizing contraceptives, a subsidy that was included a few years back in the mandatory health insurance packages employers had to provide.

While concrete measures are yet to be taken, the trend is clear: corporations are starting to be seen as relevant actors in terms of human rights. It will be interesting to see whether human rights norms will follow corporations in the near future, holding them accountable for their deeds wherever they choose to operate.