Corporate Criminal Responsibility Sample Clauses

Corporate Criminal Responsibility. A number of scholars believe that the NMT trials provide precedent for the notion of corporate criminal responsibility. Xxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx, for example, has argued that “[a] parsing of the judgments rendered… involving industrialists and other commercial actors reveals an underlying implication that the corporations for which they worked had also committed international war crimes.”13 Such interpretations are misguided. First, and most obviously, none of the trials involved allegations that juristic persons had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or crimes against peace, even though neither Law No. 10 nor Ordinance No. 7 expressly limited the tribunals‟ jurisdiction to natural persons.14 The Farben tribunal, for example, specifically pointed out that “the corporate defendant, Farben, is not before the bar of this Tribunal and cannot be subjected to criminal penalties in these proceedings.”15 Judge Xxxxxxx made a similar statement regarding Xxxxx in his concurring opinion.16 Second, the tribunals unequivocally rejected the idea that individual criminal responsibility was in any way derivative of a corporation‟s collective responsibility for a crime. Xxxxxxxxxx argues, for example, that “[b]ecause of Farben‟s liability, individual directors could be convicted by virtue of their affiliation with Farben.”17 In fact, the Farben tribunal specifically noted that although it had “used the term „Farben‟ as descriptive of the instrumentality of cohesion in the name of which the enumerated acts of spoliation were committed,” the prosecution was still required to prove “that an individual defendant was either a participant in the illegal act or that, being aware thereof, he authorized or approved it. Responsibility does not automatically attach to an act proved to be criminal merely by virtue of a defendant's membership in the Vorstand.”18 Similarly, as noted in Chapter 8, the Xxxxx tribunal rejected the prosecution‟s argument that the existence of a “Xxxxx conspiracy” meant that any member of the Vorstand or Aufsichtsrat was necessarily responsible for the crimes committed by his colleagues or predecessors.19 Third, and finally, nothing in the judgments supports the idea that a corporation‟s “collective intent” – to use Xxxxxxxxxx‟s phrase – was in any way attributable to an individual official when determining the extent of his knowledge of the corporation‟s criminal activity. In fact, according to Judge Xxxxxx, nearly all of the Farben defendants had to be...