The deluge of material about the Human Rights Act 1998 is already such that it has become trite to claim the statute has creative possibilities for the convicted, the accused and the insane.

Less often heard is the claim made for the legislation in the business context.

This is something of a small voice, for the notion of human rights for business will strike many as strange and dubious.It was ever thus.

Several members of Clement Attlee's post-war cabinet, which signed the European Convention on Human Rights to which the Act gives 'further effect', expressed concern that the Convention would inhibit the then government's nationalisation programme and its tax-gathering powers, and because of their unease a guaranteed property right was initially removed from the Convention's text.This view of the Convention, as a potential capitalist tool, continued to inform much liberal thinking until recently, so that the notion of Convention incorporation had more adherents on the right than on the left.

Some surprise then that it should be another Labour government which has seen fit to domesticate a treaty that was the subject of socialist suspicion 50 years earlier.

An explanation may lie in the fact that the new law makes Convention benefits directly available in a way that presents not only opportunities for business, but also threats.The Act speaks of victims and public authorities.

Victims can rely upon the Act to secure from public authorities those Convention guarantees now, in the government's words, 'brought home'.

Public authorities include, unsurprisingly, the great state agencies such as the police and Whitehall departments (but not Parliament itself).

Critically, however, elements of the UK's corporate sector are made public authorities by the Act, in so far as some of their functions are functions of a public nature.The government has held Railtrack up as an example of a corporate public authority, but other privatised utilities such as British Telecom, British Gas, and the electricity and water companies are likely also to be caught and made directly liable for Convention infractions.

Their statutory exposure is, it must be stressed, limited to their public functions and the government has been at pains to show that, for example, Railtrack's property development activities would not be covered, but as the key functions of a privatised transport provider is the provision of transport, it is not apparent that this carve-out amounts to much.It is not just the former state monopolies which are affected.

Businesses that have never been in the public sector may be public authorities in so far (again) as they discharge public functions.

The popularly-cited example in that regard is Group 4, because of its work in running prisons; so, too, healthcare companies operating nursery homes under local authority contracts.There is no list of public authorities and anomalies will doubtless emerge.

Odds are that the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, is a public authority, but ITV is not.

A doctor will attract public authority status when treating his NHS patients but not his private patients.The government says that it is not its purpose to hobble one company in a particular sector on account of its new human rights responsibilities, thereby leaving it at a disadvantage to its competitors.

But no indication has yet been given as to how such hobbling is to be avoided.It is this uniquely British form of Convention incorporation (in strict terms it is not incorporated at all) which fixes some of this country's highest-profile corporate names with statutory responsibility to ensure that they cleave to the Convention's safeguards.

For other parts of commerce that do not discharge public functions, the Act offers opportunities.

For example, the repatriation of article 6 of the Convention means that (like everyone else) companies are given an entrenched right to a fair trial, an aspect of which is an entitlement to a hearing before 'an independent and impartial tribunal'.

Many commercial clients are intensely regulated, often by bodies which are not remotely independent.

Some also happen to be partial.

Hence the rapid revision of rule books currently going on in hope of ensuring that regulatory procedures are rendered Convention compliant by 2 October 2000, when the Act comes fully into force.Continuing administrative unfairness will often be cured on review by the High Court, but the Act's practical implications are already such that regulators are raising their game so as not to be among the first defendants against whom a successful claim is brought on Convention grounds.Corporates can merge but not marry, so they will not at least be able to invoke article 12 of the Convention (the right to marry).

However, attempts will be made to ring-fence other Convention guarantees from companies' perceived depredations.

The BBC recently succeeded in contending that non-natural persons had no right to privacy in the broadcasting context.

Happily for industry, that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal, which found nothing in the right to respect for private life in article 8 of the Convention which prevented firms from relying on it.However, the message is clear: firms seeking to invoke the Convention's safeguards can expect to meet resistance.

It can, for example, be anticipated that the ability of companies to sue for libel will attract growing objections as being inimical to the free-expression guarantee in article 10 of the Convention.

For the present, however, that guarantee is coinciding happily with business interests.

Earlier this month, for example, the Independent Television Commission announced that the Convention had been a partial catalyst in its decision to review its advertising code, the upshot of which is likely to be that drug companies will be able to market certain products on British television for the first time.Shortly after Winston Churchill was re-elected in 1951, he ratified the Convention's first protocol, whereby '[a]very natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions', the very provision about which some Labour members had harboured concerns.

Possessions can, for these purposes, include shares, patents, the goodwill in a business, as well as real estate, so the measure of asset protection afforded corporations is potentially very wide.There is admittedly an enormous caveat permitting states to control the use of property 'in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties', a saving provision which has ensured that assaults on fiscal measures at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg have almost invariably failed.

But the right to the protection of property still merits inquisitive examination by commercial lawyers when, for example, their clients are denied planning permission.Directors should not assume that the Act will be a matter for courtroom debate only, for the government has been anxious to stress that the Act should, over time, inaugurate a cultural shift.

Part of this may derive from changes in the government's own law-making processes.

Section 19 of the Act already requires ministers to confirm that any pieces of forthcoming legislation are compatible with the Convention.

That is not to say that the relevant Bill must conform to the Convention, merely that the minister must, where he can, indicate that it does.

This is already causing civil servants effectively to pre-audit draft measures to ensure their Convention-conformity.Industry has already secured a coup in successfully seeking amendments to the government's Financial Services and Markets Bill, explicitly on human rights grounds, while IT companies are, on the same basis, now pressing for changes to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill.

Could it be that, from now on, lobbying proves more effective than litigating in establishing human rights protection for industry?Few provisions of the Convention will be of no concern to business.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers will wait with interest to see whether patients' groups succeed in showing that so-called postcode rationing of medicines breaches the right to life guaranteed by article 2.

It may be suggested against energy companies that disconnecting supply impairs family life and is in breach of article 8.

So it goes on.Whether or not the Act becomes truly pervasive will depend upon the extent to which it is given a form of horizontal effect, that is it bears upon purely private relations.

If it does, it could be that, for example, employers would be obliged to protect staff privacy.Some may rage at the prospect, but there is every reason to believe that corporates will enjoy a prominent role in the early cases litigated under the Act, whether as public authority respondents or as claimants in their own right.

Capitalist invocation of human rights instruments has been the experience in South Africa, Canada and New Zealand and there is no reason to believe that the experience in the UK will be any different.