CORPORATE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

GABRIEL PEREIRA; TRICIA OLSEN; LEIGH PAYNE

Congreso; Law and Inequalities: Global and Local; 2014

Law and Society

Democracy or Corporations? were the words that appeared on posters and in graffiti on the 26 March 2014 commemoration of the 1976 coup in Argentina. Those words capture the efforts that the country has begun in holding businesses accountable for their role in the military regime?s repressive apparatus. The efforts have even altered the labels for that regime. What was once referred to as the military dictatorship is now called the ?civil-military? dictatorship thereby linking military and business sectors in the repressive apparatus. Argentina is not alone in holding perpetrators accountable for their complicity during past authoritarian periods. The International Military Tribunal following the Holocaust tried and executed businessman Bruno Emil Tesch for supplying the Zyklon B gas used in extermination camps. Other firms, such as BMW and Volkswagen, were held accountable for slave labor. Swiss banks and insurance companies are still under investigation for failing to pay out assets and claims to Holocaust victims. Since the Holocaust, other forms of accountability for corporate complicity have occurred. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in its ?media case,? for example, convicted three businessmen for their complicity in the 1994 genocide. Truth Commissions in East Timor, Liberia, and South Africa investigated business complicity, and Brazil?s current truth commission initiated investigations into similar allegations there. Foreign civil trials against businesses engaged in complicity with repressive authoritarian regimes have been brought in US courts, such as the Khulumani victims? support group in South Africa against companies? complicity in apartheid, and the Ongoni peoples? claims against Shell Oil for collaborating with the national military and police in the murder of political activists. These examples demonstrate that a range of mechanisms from the transitional justice toolkit have been used throughout the world to address corporate complicity. Nonetheless, systematic analysis of these cases has not yet emerged or produced a compelling theoretical framework for understanding whether, when, where, why, and how corporate complicity should form part of the transitional justice toolkit. This paper aspires to initiate that process. This is not the first project to consider the relationship of corporate complicity to transitional justice. We draw on existing studies of single countries or single mechanisms in developing our own approach to transitional justice and corporate complicity. However, we attempt to contribute to the ongoing debate regarding corporate complicity by using our original Corporations and Human Rights Database (CHRD, see Appendix) and AHRC-NSF-supported study of ?alternative accountabilities? to begin to explain what makes accountability for corporate complicity possible and whether such efforts advance transitional justice goals.