Corporate Complicity in International Human Rights Violations

Abstract

Two literatures-business and human rights and transitional justice-can be usefully combined to consider the issue of corporate complicity in past human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflicts. But although the transitional justice literature emphasizes the positive role that international pressure plays in advancing justice, the business and human rights literature identifies international constraints in the area of corporate abuses. These include the lack of settled law establishing businesses' human rights responsibilities, the absence of courts to adjudicate corporate human rights violation cases, and the international focus on voluntary principles over legal obligations. Despite this unpropitious international climate, civil society mobilization and judicial innovation have advanced accountability efforts and overcome the strong veto power of business in some countries, often creatively blending international and domestic law. These efforts from below provide access to justice for victims and potential models for overcoming the current accountability gap. 20.1

Disappearances in Mexico

“…The economic logic or political economy of disappearance refers the economic events linked with the disappearances. As recent studies on corporate responsibility for human rights violations in Colombia and Argentina during the last military dictatorship have shown (Payne and Pereira 2016), the economic interests of companies operated in collaboration with the state authorities to disappear union leaders and even hosted detention centres in corporate facilities during the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the Colombian armed conflict. In other words, even when the main purpose of disappearing people during military dictatorships was to eliminate political opponents, in some cases these political opponents were unions leaders or workers whose companies were abetting, allowing, or encouraging practices of state terrorism against their employees.…”

The Idea of Corporate Transitional Justice: Paths to Corporate Criminology in Brazil

“…Although seminal for understanding TJ in Brazil, Payne’s reflections are limited to understanding the tolerance on the part of national elites in relation to the opening of the regime. Later, along with Gabriel Pereira, the investigations have been refined—based on the convergence of research methods in the field of business, human rights, and TJ—and revealed some aspects of corporate complicity and problematic accountability (Payne & Pereira, 2016).…”

“…Ramasastry (2004) has classified three types of complicity (direct corporate complicity, in which corporations’ decisions favor participation in human rights abuses, particularly torture, kidnapping, private imprisonment, and murder; indirect or beneficiary corporate complicity, in which a corporation does not itself commit crime but benefits from crime; and silence or inaction in relation to a host government’s human rights violations, in which a corporation’s mere presence in an authoritarian context in itself amounts to violation, referring to its duty to speak out against violations of rights; similar, Clapham, 2006). Paine and Pereira work with a broader perspective: Corporate complicity does not require ideological affinity between corporations and their state or state-like partners, there are many contexts in which corporations defend their actions as a result of extreme pressure rather than willful collaboration (Payne & Pereira, 2016; similar, Kauzlarich, 2003).…”

Transitional Justice in Latin America: Toward What Kind of Justice?

“…Although some civilians have been prosecuted, members of the armed forces predominate on the stand. Moreover, while civilian prosecutions have included church figures, doctors, judges and individual businesspeople, the role of business per se in collaborating with grave human rights violations remains a challenge for criminal justice in particular, and transitional justice in general (Payne & Pereira, 2016).…”