[Steven Ratner is the Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.]
James Stewart’s “
The Turn to Corporate Criminal Liability for International Crimes” provides an important contribution in the ongoing debates regarding corporate accountability for human rights violations, a debate that has assumed even greater prominence since the publication of the
UN’s Guiding Principles and an ongoing process of discussions within the UN on new strategies for businesses to respect human rights. Stewart makes three compelling points with which I think most observers of the topic would agree. First, many human rights advocates and scholars have had far too much faith in the ATS as a vehicle for accountability, leading to undue disappointment in its limited scope after
Kiobel. Second, the ATS jurisprudence was marred by doctrinal confusion, the straitjacket of identifying norms as customary international law, and concerns that courts were acting at odds with legislative and executive branch policy. Third, international criminal law (ICL) offers a potentially useful tool for corporate accountability in overcoming some of the difficulties of the ATS. The acceptance of corporate criminality in many states offers a domestic law mechanism for trying corporations.
Despite my agreement with the thrust of the piece and the need to tackle what has remained a marginal method of corporate accountability, I think corporate criminality is not quite the promising terrain for corporate accountability that Stewart’s analysis suggests, for three different reasons.
First, the link between the ATS and ICL that dominates the piece (e.g., calling them “brother[s]-in-arms”) -- and thus views ICL as a response to the demise of the ATS vehicle – seems somewhat strained. The ATS was and remains a uniquely American statute – there is none other like it in the world – and despite great faith in it by some, my sense is that sophisticated human rights advocates never saw it as the major forum for even judicial accountability of corporations. ICL is not an alternative to the ATS; it is an alternative to
other forms of corporate responsibility, including civil responsibility, loss of reputation, and other ways that corporations can be held to account for any human rights violations. The post-
Kiobel constraints on the ATS, and the conceptual confusion before
Kiobel, thus do not themselves call for switching to criminal liability. Most obviously, civil liability may be viable in other venues, as seen in the
other lawsuit against Shell, in the
Dutch courts.
Moreover, even if we think the conceptual problems in the ATS caselaw somehow doom civil liability, it is not clear how switching to the ICL model eliminates one serious problem with all efforts by home states to regulate corporations through national law -- the very problem that
Kiobel addressed, i.e., the extraterritorial reach of domestic law. While international crimes are subject to universal jurisdiction, universal jurisdiction is still only
permissive and not mandatory. The duty, if there is one, for states to punish all international crimes (e.g., as suggested in the preamble to the ICC Statute) is a very weak one; the only clear duties are those in specific treaties like the Torture or Disappearances Conventions. So why assume that states will pass criminal statutes (even covering obvious international crimes) covering conduct by their companies abroad, let alone that they will criminalize conduct by foreign companies against foreigners abroad? Though certainly states have interests in
regulating much overseas corporate conduct (making the
Kiobel majority’s presumption completely antiquated), they still have many reasons not to
criminalize extraterritorial human rights abuses, either by individuals and corporations. True, states have shown the political will to criminalize some corporate conduct abroad through the UN Corruption Convention, but that took thirty years of American pressure, dictated by a commercially driven desire to level the playing field.
It is also not clear how the move to ICL eliminates one of the other problems that Stewart thoughtfully identifies regarding the ATS caselaw – the muddied notion of accomplice liability. Although domestic criminal laws define degrees of complicity, they vary significantly throughout the world. That is not a problem if we are content with a corporate criminality regime that tolerates significant diversity across states, but in that case, why not just rely on diverse notions of civil or even administrative liability around the world? If, on the other hand, we think such diversity of criminal law accomplice liability standards is suboptimal, then states will need to incorporate not merely the definitions of crimes in international law into their domestic law, but also an international notion of accomplice liability.
