Seeking to address the problem of corporate involvement in grave human rights abuse, i.e. genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, this study explores the desirability and feasibility of subjecting business enterprises to regulation through international criminal law.

With industrialization and globalization, corporations acquired the capacity to influence social life for good or for ill. Yet, corporations are not traditional objects of criminal law. Justified by notions of personal moral guilt, criminal norms have been judged inapplicable to fictional persons, who ‘think’ and ‘act’ through human beings. The expansion of new corporate criminal liability (CCL) laws since the mid-1990s challenges this assumption. Our volume surveys current practice on CCL in 15 civil and common law jurisdictions, exploring the legal conditions for liability, the principles and options for sanctioning, and the procedures for investigating, charging and trying corporate offenders. It considers whether municipal CCL laws are converging around the notion of ‘corporate culture’, and, in any case, the implications of CCL for those charged with keeping corporations, and other legal entities, out of trouble.

Corporate Criminal Liability is on the rise worldwide: More and more legal systems now include genuinely criminal sanctioning for legal entities. The various regulatory options available to national criminal justice systems, their implications and their constitutional, economic and psychological parameters are key questions addressed in this volume. Specific emphasis is put on procedural questions relating to corporate criminal liability, on alternative sanctions such as blacklisting of corporations, on common corporate crimes and on questions of transnational criminal justice.

Presently, many of the greatest debates and controversies in international criminal law concern modes of liability for international crimes. The state of the law is unclear, to the detriment of accountability for major crimes and of the uniformity of international criminal law. The present book aims at clarifying the state of the law and provides a thorough analysis of the jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals, as well as of the debates and the questions these debates have left open. Renowned international criminal law scholars analyze, in discrete chapters, the modes of liability one by one; for each mode they identify the main trends in the jurisprudence and the main points of controversy. An introduction addresses the cross-cutting issues, and a conclusion anticipates possible evolutions that we may see in the future. The research on which this book is based was undertaken with the Geneva Academy.

This timely book explores the prospect of prosecuting corporations or individuals within the business world for conduct amounting to international crime. Joanna Kyriakakis surveys the state of the art in the field, highlighting the case for the international criminal justice project to engage more fully with the role industry can play in atrocity. From the post World War II era to contemporary international criminal courts and tribunals and the activities of domestic criminal justice agencies, this book analyses cases and international law reform efforts aimed at accounting for business involvement in international crimes. The major debates and ensuing challenges are examined, arguing that corporate accountability under international criminal law is crucial in achieving the objectives of international criminal justice. Students, practitioners and academics of international criminal law will find this a beneficial read, particularly through its engagement with the key contemporary debate around the extension of international criminal law to business actors. The exploration of how to address the global governance gap and better account for human rights abuses in transnational corporate activity will also make this an invigorating book for business and human rights scholars.

Anchored by the normative framework, this book aims to clarify the basis for individual criminal liability for persons who finance entities that perpetrate core crimes. The objective of this monograph is to clarify the rules to enable international courts and tribunals to identify the extent to which individual criminal liability attaches to the financing of core crimes, as well as the legal basis for such liability. By clarifying the criminal liability of individual who finance entities that perpetrate core crimes, this book also seeks to clarify the mental elements of the mode of liability of aiding and abetting. This is achieved through a thorough analysis of the applicable rules in the international arena, as well as through the comparative analysis.

The proper construction of co-perpetration responsibility in international criminal law has become one of the most enduring controversies in this field, with the UN Tribunals endorsing the theory of joint criminal enterprise, and the International Criminal Court adopting the alternative joint control over the crime theory to define this mode of liability. This book seeks to reconcile the ICTY/R’s and ICC’s jurisprudence by providing a definition of co-perpetration that could be uniformly applied in the two justice models that these institutions represent: the ad hoc- and the treaty-based model. An evaluation framework is adopted, pursuant to which the origins, merits and deficiencies of the said competing theories are critically assessed, and a refined legal framework of co-perpetration responsibility is proposed.