Abstracts Category : Other

Mass Grave Aesthetics: Or how profit motivated business can trigger multinational corporations criminal liability for participating in international or transnational crimes

by Arnar gstsson orvarur

Studies have shown that companies may gain additional profits from leaning their business towards conflict zones, making such investments more appealing to their shareholders. The demand for company involvement within a given conflict zone is notably high with respect to the constant need to fuel the financially costly conflict. Companies seem to gain extra bargaining power with the ability to wield more influence to gain more economically favorable deals, such as lower license costs. Additionally, long-term warfare weakens all systematic transparency, making it easier for companies to conduct illicit business operations in the shadow of war. A company can theoretically become liable for any offense a natural person could be prosecuted for. Criminal liability can therefore be imposed on both incorporated and unincorporated bodies. States have generally incorporated elements of corporate criminal liability into their national penal codes and the first attempts have been made to include corporate criminal liability within the statute of an international criminal court. Regardless of the importance of corporate criminal liability, it is recognized that the most imperative part of bringing corporate actors to justice is the prosecution of the natural person responsible for the actions. This could be a single business leader or a whole board of directors. This thesis highlights how corporations may serve as a leading role in financing a conflict and therefore, in some cases, either enable a perpetrator to engineer a disaster or create the demand for an international crime to be committed. Forms of transnational crimes are also discussed and alternatives to the principle of aiding and abetting are proposed. Business leaders have often acted audaciously under the veil of the legal personality of their corporation, as if by acting on behalf of an apocryphal person their liability might be somehow limited. Although the rationale behind that mentality is fundamentally flawed, some insight into company law should be useful in order to venture onward in the pursuit of the true catalyst responsible for enabling, facilitating or exacerbating the commission of a crime. Multinational corporations or worldwide enterprises, may engage in a long term business relationship with a perpetrator, participating in multiple contracts, or completing transactions through subsidiary companies located in different states. Tracing such a net of transactions involves a great degree of complexity, yet at the same time it opens up multiple options for jurisdictions. Legal accountability is determined via traditional principles of aiding and abetting but the focus is on one of the lower forms of complicity or financial complicity through bilateral business transactions.