This was all good knock-about stuff. But what makes the trial so significant for the accountability of corporations are the principles upon which Burke based his case. For him, natural law meant that all humans should be accorded equal rights to justice, wherever they may be. ‘The laws of morality’, he declared on the third day of the trial, ‘are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and the world over.
Against the corrosive relativism that was increasingly viewing India as an inferior land in which different standards of justice should be applied, Burke unfurled the standard of absolute values. ‘I must do justice to the East’, he declared, for ‘I assert that their morality is equal to ours.’ Full of contempt for what he saw as Hastings’s ‘geographical morality’, Burke denounced the view that ’the duties of men are not to be governed by their relations to the great governor of the universe, or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude, parallels not of life but of latitudes’, adding in a wonderful image: ‘as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial line, all the virtues die’. For someone who would become so opposed to Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in the heat of the French Revolution, the peculiar thing is that in his contest with Hastings Burke propounded the case for universal human rights.
“Geographical Morality”, p133-134
Edmund Burke and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings
It is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons, I impeach Warren Hastings Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanours.
I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.
I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.
I impeach him in the name of human nature himself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in very age, rank, situation and condition of life.
“A Soft Impeachment”, p135
