CORPORATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND ATROCITY CRIMES:

167 have selective and personal aspects. Family issues in the Shia tradition depend on a dynamic jurisprudence. Hence, some jurisprudents have attempted to interpret religious laws in a correct and up-to-date manner and expressed some new thoughts about women, such as equalizing the amount of blood money between men and women, preferring women over men as caretakers of children, or disapproving of ill-treatment of women by men. These new approaches have been reflected in the laws of Iran as the most populated Shia State. The method of the current research is an analytical method based on Islamic sources combined with a statistical approach. The current research focuses on the basis of justice in Shia families and the causes of domestic violence. The findings of this research show that the justice in Shia families is based on the balance of rights instead of equity.

Empirically, this argument will be examined in the case study of the violation of the right to land and property – including the rampant phenomenon of post-Taliban land grabbing-- in Kabul, Afghanistan. The question of access to land and property is a critical one for a large number of the population as, on the one hand, decades of conflict have produced millions of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and on the other public and private lands have been grabbed by powerful warlords, most of whom happen to be human rights violators from the past regimes and functioning as state representatives in the current one. To this end, employing qualitative method, more than 60 interviews have been carried out with the affected population in various Kabul neighbourhoods in an attempt to 1) understand victims’

experiences and perceptions 2) examine the nature of violation (i.e. individual vs. collective responsibility and the degree to which this can relate to state actors) and 3) assess redress mechanisms. It is hoped that an empirical inquiry will, on the one hand, inform the evolving discourses on the nature and types of state crime and, on the other, contribute to the ongoing debates on mechanisms to address and redress legacies of human rights violation.

0214 - ECONOMIC CRIMES: CHALLENGES OF THE ICL Sunčana Roksandić Vidlička (Croatia)¹

1 - Department of Criminal Law, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb

Serious economic crimes and violations of economic, social and cultural rights have often been neglected in criminal proceedings and/or reports of truth commissions that have followed economic transitions or conflicts. Although these economic crimes often resulted in a substantial loss of profit in the overall economy and in society, they have not been widely and effectively prosecuted. However, from Nuremberg on, there have been attempts and successful examples of prosecuting war profiteering cases. Even quite recently, International Criminal Court’s prosecutor called for such a prosecution to be conducted before the ICC.

This presentation focuses on criminal responsibility for severe economic offences, as well as on establishing serious economic criminal offence as crime under international law. It explores legal and social preconditions under which serious economic offences in general may be characterized as crimes under international criminal law. It searches for answers as to why those crimes were left out of the focus of mainstream international criminal law development since the end of WWII. The presentation concentrates on the possibilities of the ICC Statute in responding to the need of globalized world and start prosecuting serious economic crimes.

0215 - TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMES: DESERTS AND SANCTION PYRAMIDS

169 Since the Nuremberg Trials, small businesses and large international corporations have not been exempt from prosecution for their involvement in mass atrocities and international crimes. This applies to the small firm which delivered Zyklon B for the gas chambers of Auschwitz as well as to IG Farben, Siemens and Krupp for their exploitation of forced labour.

Presently, transnational corporations see themselves entangled in a “web of liabilities”

concerning the observance of human rights of workers, or of surrounding communities and their living environment, as well as their complicity in committing atrocity crimes.

Simultaneously, a “web of compliance” has emerged which combines a range of different regulatory measures, sanction mechanisms, as well as activities and pressure from civil society actors. This paper draws on research on white collar, corporate and elite crime in assessing different types of regulatory and sanction mechanisms, and their impact on compliance. Given the high level of complicity between corporations and states, this perspective is complemented by lessons to be drawn from research on state crime.

0216 - RISKY BUSINESS: INDUSTRIES AND GROSS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS Wim Huisman (Netherlands)¹; Annika Van Baar (Netherlands)¹

1 - VU University Amsterdam

The French ICT companies Amesys and Qosmos are under criminal investigation for complicity to torture for the sale of electronic surveillance equipment to the regimes of respectively Kaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria. In the past, various mining companies have come under scrutiny for buying ores or gems originating from countries where atrocities have been committed by the factions engaged in armed conflict over the control of these mining areas. In the Netherlands, a businessman has been convicted for complicity to war crimes by supplying precursors of chemical weapons to the regime of Saddam Hussein. A criminal case against a Dutch director of a logging company for complicity to the war crimes committed by the regime of former president Charles Taylor in Liberia is still pending. Increasingly, companies and their managers are seen as perpetrators in the commission of international crimes. This paper will report on a study of 84 cases in which companies have been accused of involvement in gross human rights violations. For this paper, an analysis has been conducted of the types of businesses that were involved in these crimes and the risks and criminogenic opportunities that are associated with certain branches of industry.

3.9 CRIME CAUGHT ON CAMERA