International Commission of Jurists Attempts to Hold Corporations Responsible for Human Rights Abuses
CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP, HUMAN RIGHTS, LAW & JUSTICE
Thursday, October 2, 2008
In an effort to encourage businesses and corporations to consider international law when engaging in business activities, the International Commission of Jurists’ (ICJ) Expert Legal Panel on Corporate Complicity in International Crimes has published a three-volume report titled “Corporate Complicity & Legal Accountability.”
The report, released on September 16th, is a culmination of over two years of research that studies “corporate complicity in gross human rights abuses from different angles,” and attempts to give guidance on when corporations and businesses can be held legally responsible for violations of human rights.
According to the Expert Legal Panel, companies can be held accountable for gross human rights abuses if they are considered to have “enabled, exacerbated or facilitated” those abuses. They can also be considered complicit in those abuses if they knew or should have known that their business actions would result in violations of human rights.
Thus, before engaging in a business agreement, the Expert Legal Panel insists that corporations and businesses conduct some type of human rights impact assessment, whereby they 1) investigate how their products or services will be used by others and the human rights records of any business partners they may have, and 2) ensure that any supplies that they have received were also free of human rights abuses.
In the opinion of the Expert Legal Panel, if a company fails to make such assurances and human rights abuses do occur, the company should be found responsible for, or complicit in, those violations and subject to penalty under international law.
It is important to note, however, that the International Criminal Court (ICC), which would be the obvious venue for trying such cases, cannot actually prosecute companies. Rather, they can only accuse and try individuals within a company (though the Expert Legal Panel advocates changing this).
Ultimately, international human rights law is directed towards States and governments, not towards corporations and businesses. It is therefore questionable whether companies, or even individuals within those companies, can be held legally responsible for human rights violations under international law.
Jim Kelly is the President of Solidarity Center for Law and Justice, P.C., a public interest civil and human rights law firm based in Atlanta, Georgia. The opinions expressed herein are his own.
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