| Home > What We Do > Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Criminal Liability | Français| Site Map |
What We Do
Membership Campaign
The ICDAA Board of Directors invites you to become a member or to renew you membership for 2007. Sign Up »
Fundraising Campaign
The ICDAA has launched a special appeal by mobilizing existing members and recruiting new and former members and others who, over the years, have contributed to the advancement of the organization's overall objectives. Donate »
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Criminal Liability
Multinational corporations have decades of experience dealing with the large basket of issues labelled broadly "corporate social responsibility" (CSR). They are used to dealing with pressure from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to ensure that their business operations comply with emerging standards in such varied fields as labour relations, environmental protection and fair trade sourcing.
The CSR universe is not familiar to most criminal defence lawyers. But they need to understand and monitor how the multitude of CSR issues intersect with the so-called blame culture, which translates into strong political pressure to prosecute "corporate criminals" for a growing variety of offences. There is, in fact, an increasing number of criminal prosecutions of business executives, directors and corporations. In North America , the current focus is on prosecutions of executives for financial fraud and insider trading. In the United Kingdom , the focus is broader. It encompasses financial fraud, cartels and price fixing, proceeds of crime, industrial accidents and lethal train accidents. In France , industrial accidents and tainted blood supplies have been the focus of criminal prosecutions, with prosecutors and judges showing a strong tendency to remove traditional immunity from leaders.
Many governments are combating money laundering associated with the international drug trade and terrorism, creating new obligations for financial institutions, corporations and even professional partnerships to report sensitive financial transactions to the government.
Some of the major human rights and social issues in the "CSR" universe may soon move from the domain of voluntary corporate action to that of legally required conduct - with enforcement imposed via criminal or major civil penalties. This is the focus of the first special research and monitoring project supported by the Defence Watch (see box).