Corporate Social Responsibility and the Responsibility to Protect: Corporate Liability for International Crimes

Abstract

The authors present a survey of both international and national forms of corporate liability for conduct constituting genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. As a response to the relationship between businesses and conflict, the increasing impacts (both positive and negative) of multinational corporate involvement and activity in regions experiencing civil unrest and often violent conflict, the rapidly changing regulatory landscape for companies operating in conflict zones, and increasing activism targeting corporations operating in conflict zones, the authors consider the role of corporations in preventing, responding to and redressing armed conflict in the light of the powerful normative doctrines of Responsibility to Protect and Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper focuses first on certain foundational principles concerning legal personality and corporate accountability in both national and international law, and then turns to international and domestic mechanisms, efforts and possibilities to hold corporations and their officials accountable by criminal, civil and regulatory means. The final section will look at corporations’ voluntary selfregulation, relative to international humanitarian law and other norms, followed by some concluding observations.