Corporate complicity and transitional justice: setting the scene

Book section

Corporate complicity in the human rights abuses of dictatorships and in armed conflict is not a new transitional justice phenomenon. Rough justice for such violations was meted out by the Allied Forces at Nuremberg when Bruno Tesch was tried, found guilty, and executed for the sale of the Zyklon B gas used in extermination camps in Nazi Germany. Forty additional businessmen were put on trial in the ‘industrialist cases’ at Nuremberg for Nazi-era slave labour, theft of Jewish property, and the production and sale of weapons of aggressive war and mass extermination. Many of them were convicted and imprisoned. Thus, just as the notion of transitional justice is said to have begun with the Nuremberg trials, so too could we say that corporate complicity was included in that process from its very origins.

Authors: Payne, L; Pereira, G

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: PAX
• Host title: Peace, Everyone's Business!: Corporate Accountability in Transitional Justice: Lessons for Colombia
• Series: Peace, Everyone's Business!: Corporate Accountability in Transitional Justice: Lessons for Colombia
• Publication date: 2017-06-07
• ISBN: 9789492487131
• Keywords: SBTMR