Common Law On The Environmental Responsibilities Of Multinational Companies

This paper mainly discusses the environmental liability of a transnational corporationin tort law. As the fast development of global economy, the global environment isgetting worse. Currently, transnational corporations are predominant in the economicactivities worldwide. While they bring great development to the globe, theirsubsidiary corporations bring a lot damages to the developing countries. The parentcorporations and the subsidiary corporations have the same interest in the wholeworld, and activities of subsidiary corporations are actually arranged by their parentcorporations. However, when environmental damage happens, parent corporationsalways don't have to take any environmental liability, with the reason that both parentcorporations and their subsidiaries are independent from each other. As a result, theparent corporation can enjoy the interest subsidiaries bring, while it also can escapefrom taking any legal liability. Then people increasingly pay more attention to theeffects on the global ecological environment that they may lead to. From now on,there are few laws and regulations on the transnational corporations. Therefore,transnational corporations' liabilities on the environmental damages that theirsubsidiaries cause in the host countries should be paid more attention. Theenvironmental liability of transnational corporations is mainly about two issues: one iswhether the parent corporation should undertake the environmental liability;the otheris how to get the parent corporation undertake the environmental liability. The articleintroduces the theories and cases of America and British, make some preliminaryresearch on the undertaking form of transnational corporations' environmental liability.And at last, there is some discussion on the preventive arrangement. The article putsforward some legislative suggestions to China finally.