Corporate criminal liability for foreign bribery: perspectives from civil law jurisdictions within the European Union

Abstract

This paper discusses corporate criminal liability for foreign bribery from the continental European perspective. Despite a lot of policy rhetoric, corporate crime has been and still is an alien concept within the family of continental law jurisdictions. This paper explains the doctrinal misgivings with the idea of corporate crime, the pertinent EU law, and also a recent ruling by the Austrian Constitutional Court upholding the respective Austrian Act. Regarding the use of external agents, the paper argues that any imposition of certain organisational requirements relating to corporate criminal responsibility on to third parties is likely to impede the emergence of efficient legal structures to tackle the issues at stake.