Ensuring corporations are held accountable for human rights crimes
When corporations engage in illegal conduct that results in serious human rights abuse, they rarely, if ever, are held to account.
As a result, victims are being denied an essential form of justice, and implicated actors, including commercial entities and individuals, are allowed to act with impunity.
To address this, we work with civil society groups and law enforcement to promote awareness of corporate criminal accountability and push for prosecution of corporate crimes.
The Commerce, Crime, and Human Rights Project
The Commerce, Crime, and Human Rights Project (“the Project”) was launched jointly by Amnesty International and the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) on 26 February 2014. The Project seeks to identify and address why States and law enforcement are rarely pursuing corporate criminal accountability in human rights cases.
A group of eminent legal experts, with the support of Amnesty International and ICAR, developed “The Corporate Crimes Principles: Advancing Investigations and Prosecutions in Human Rights Cases” (“the Principles”) to encourage State actors to combat corporate crimes more effectively. The Principles seek to address the impunity gap by providing a common, global approach to the investigation and prosecution of corporate crime, taking better account of the range of corporate actors that may be implicated.
The Principles are aimed at law enforcement officials, including police, investigators, prosecutors, judges and government legal counsel as well as State executive and legislative bodies. They have been developed in consultation with investigators, prosecutors, lawyers and civil society actors specialising in human rights. The Principles are intended to ensure that corporate crimes do not go unpunished. This will benefit victims and their representatives, human rights defenders, lawyers and law-abiding corporate actors.
For more information about the Project, please visit this website.
For more information on ICAR’s work related to CCHR, contact ICAR’s Legal and Policy Associate, Sophia Lin, at sophia@icar.ngo.