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• The ICC & Business
• The Issue: Ending Political Impunity & Corporate Immunity

Multinational corporations have experience with the NGOs and human rights issues. But they expect the attacks to focus on the direct impacts of their business operations, mainly in the areas of labour, environmental, community and social standards. How can corporations be also held responsible for genocide, war crimes and mass human rights violations?

The short answer is that corporations are not viewed as the starring actors in these political tragedies. Rather, in certain circumstances, they can be viewed as supporting actors .

The core aim of the ICC is to end impunity for the leadership groups, whether they be state or non state actors, who are responsible for genocide and war crimes. But those leaders almost never commit the physical acts of atrocity themselves - they give orders or incite the foot soldiers and terrorist gangs to commit the crimes. For this reason, major war crimes trials often focus on what happened behind the scenes. They look at chains of command used by government leaders, military leaders and the heads of non-state organizations such as, for example, guerrilla armies or terrorist networks. They also look at other "support systems" for mass violence; especially the role of the media and influential opinion leaders in inciting violence.

There also is increasing interest in the economic and financial support systems for war and mass killing. The starting point was the Nuremberg trials, which exposed the Nazi industrial system and tried several Nazi leaders for their role in war production, forced labour systems and the banking system.

Today, there are many examples. In the Congo , a widely cited example, a report prepared for the UN Security Council in 2002 points to the activities of "elite networks" that link military leaders to business people and international trading and financial networks. It paints a picture of micro-conflicts fought by these networks over farm produce, land, the right to collect taxes and mineral deposits. And it speaks of "a self financing war economy centred on mineral exploitation."

If companies participate in such war economies, their business leaders will not benefit from automatic immunity from investigation or prosecution by the ICC. While the ICC has no jurisdiction to prosecute governments or corporations, it can try any individual- including business leaders. The ICC Chief Prosecutor can also work with national prosecutors to investigate and prosecute both corporations and their executives.

It is a political reality that NGOs will, in many cases, begin investigating and "exposing" corporate relationships with oppressive regimes well before any charges are filed (and even if they not). This will lead to "criminal branding" of the corporation, and possible reputation loss, outside the courts.

Corporate executives and employees do not commit atrocities themselves. But every company is involved to some extent in the system of governance in a country and has some relationship with the governing regime. So, what is the nature of that involvement and that relationship? What if businesses operate in countries that become conflict zones or descend into civil wars? Or what if they have profitable business relationships with governments and political leaders who organize ethnic cleansing campaigns?

These hard questions are being asked by many international stakeholders and institutions: the NGOs, the United Nations, the World Bank and even the Harvard Business Review. All are concerned with the economic systems that support oppressive regimes and war. For example, a World Bank analysis indicates that civil wars often occur in poor countries where one large ethnic group dominates others and where it is easy to capture income from exports of oil, diamonds or drugs. George Soros also points to "a close connection between the exploitation of natural resources and the prevalence of corrupt and oppressive regimes . controlling vast flows of money gives dictators a powerful incentive to cling to power. Without the need for broader public support, these regimes can oppress their citizens and ignore basic needs such as healthcare and education."

Final report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2002/1146

George Soros, Open up the books, Corporate Knights, Volume 1, No. 4, p.41