An examination on corporate complicity with human ...

An examination on corporate complicity with human rights violations and the issues with criminal liability
After the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945, many company officials were charged with complicity in Nazi war crimes; some had even “Supplied poisonous gas to concentration camps knowing it would be used to exterminate human beings”. In 1999, Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General, “asked world business to ‘support and respect the protection of international human rights within their spheres of influence’ and ‘to make sure their own corporations were not complicit in human rights abuses’”. This statement was made as part of a Compact designed to address one of the largest problems with the globalisation of commerce and industry: corporate complicity in the violation of human rights.
Corporate globalisation has increased the likelihood that Western-based companies will trade with or conduct business in oppressive regimes. These corporations face popular and governmental pressure to avoid assisting in human rights violations, with the risk that they may be prosecuted under international law. Several notorious instances of corporations being active in the violation of human rights: “They occurred, predictably, where governance challenges were greatest: disproportionately in low income countries; in countries that often had just emerged from or still were in conflict; and in countries where the rule of law was weak and levels of corruption high. A significant fraction of the allegations involved companies being complicit in the acts of governments or armed factions”. Concern over these violations has lead international bodies to seek methods of restraining multinational companies. Increasing attention is being paid to using the legal term ‘complicity’ to bring corporate violators to justice, and how to use this term to prove corporate liability when human rights violations occur.
In the 1990’s, it became clear that Western corporations were deeply involved in regimes which denied basic human rights to their citizens, and had on occasion been the instigators of brutality: “Advocates of greater corporate accountability for human rights violations argue that companies do sometimes significantly contribute to the ability of a government to carry out systematic abuses of human rights”. Companies were not simply working in nations where there was violence, state-sanctioned murders and other atrocities, but provided the means and the motivation for some of these incidents. Sometimes, corporations may be in a nation during regime change, or during unrest: “companies find themselves caught up in situations of conflict and human rights violations which are the context for their operations in many countries today”. However corporations come in be in these situations, they may assist the ruling party in acts of human rights violation.
Corporation ...