Annika van Baar

In 2024, the European Union adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which imposes mandatory human rights due diligence (mHRDD) on Europe’s largest companies. Drawing on corporate submissions to the European Union (EU) and Dutch public consultations, semi-structured interviews, media analysis, and non-governmental organization (NGO) reports, this chapter investigates Dutch business perspectives on mHRDD, focusing on the CSDDD and its Dutch implementation. Situating mHRDD within the “justice cascade” – the broader shift toward holding accountable those who commit human rights violations – and the competing historical tendency of corporations to resist binding regulation, the analysis reveals a central pattern: Dutch businesses broadly accept human rights due diligence as a practice and support an EU-wide framework that emphasizes harmonization and a level playing field, yet resists accountability mechanisms – particularly civil and criminal liability – that would make such regulation enforceable. Voluntary instruments such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) have made human rights due diligence (HRDD) norms an accepted baseline, but corporate resistance surfaces when hard regulations exceed what these instruments require. This chapter shows how a shift in political climate – catalyzed by the 2024 Draghi Report on European competitiveness and the 2025 EU’s “Omnibus Simplification Package” – provided resistant voices with new vocabulary, threatening to cap the cascade, despite evidence of genuine corporate support for stronger human rights regulation.

1. In 2018, the French public prosecutor officially charged senior executives of Lafarge SA and the company as a legal person after an extensive investigation into allegations of terrorism financin...

Involvement of corporations in international crimes and conflict atrocities, such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, are neither isolated events nor uncommon. Importantly, corporate involvement in atrocity crimes is shaped by conditions in “zones of legal risk” (International Commission of Jurists), where gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes and extreme violence are pervasive. In this context, corporations become complicit in the most serious state crimes. The empirical study of 205 historical and contemporary cases across all global regions in a total of 36 countries explores patterns of involvement starting from the conceptual framework developed by the International Commission of Jurists. We identify six “risk profiles” of involvement defined by industry type, partners in such crimes, and the type of involvement and contribution to the crimes. Our results showcase the relationship between corporate characteristics and risks of involvement in serious violence for different risk profiles across space and time. Starting from a legal conceptual framework, we discuss how these results contribute to criminological theories of corporate crime, as well as to regulation theory and practice.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, corporations have come under scrutiny for their business operations in or with Russia. For many corporations, continuing operations in or with Russia meant a risk to be contributing to the commission of Russian atrocity crimes such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Based on accusations against corporations for business conduct that can be linked to the commission of atrocities, this article offers a criminological analysis of corporate involvement in atrocities in this context. It first looks at how corporations have allegedly been involved and proposes a continuum of involvement ranging from the most distant to the most proximate ways corporations have been linked to atrocity crimes. Then, the article uses a theoretical framework to explain and understand corporate involvement in atrocity crimes to answer the question of why corporations have become involved in Russian atrocity crimes in Ukraine. It is concluded that profit motivations can lead to both the decision to stay and the decision to leave, and that over time, coercion and lack of opportunity to leave Russia are part of the explanations of continued involvement. War has restricted the opportunity structures for some companies but opened new opportunities for others. Moreover, sanctions law has not been effective in halting all exports and imports from Russia, existing soft-law initiatives are not reflected in corporate decision making, and while public condemnation has been strong, this was not mirrored by market reactions.

Corporate involvement in atrocity crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, has become an important topic for ngo s, activists and scholars from different disciplines, often focusing on the important question how to achieve a better regulation of and accountability for corporate roles in atrocities. This contribution, instead, is focused on the aetiology of this phenomenon. A theoretical framework is proposed based on, on the one hand, what follows from criminological research on corporate crime, state crime and state-corporate crime and, on the other hand, in-depth case studies of three contexts: Nazi Germany (1933–1945), Apartheid South Africa (1948–1994) and the drc (1996–2016). The proposed framework identifies the motivational drivers, opportunity aspects, and elements of the (lack of) control that, together, can explain why that corporation became involved in atrocity crimes. The framework is intended to—through application to new case studies—improve knowledge about and understanding of corporate involvement in atrocity crimes and to expand the conceptual and theoretical understanding of this phenomenon.

Corporate involvement in atrocity crimes refers to instances in which businesses are linked to the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or other gross human rights violations. This article traces four trends in the regulation of this phenomenon, from the 1600 s to the present. I argue that the persuasive trend of no regulation of this type of corporate wrongdoing has seen three countertrends: international criminal justice, civil society labelling corporate involvement in atrocity crimes as something worth engaging with, and institutionalization of norms. This article describes and analyses these trends, uncovering some recurring patterns that emerge in efforts towards preventing, ending, or limiting corporate involvement in atrocity crimes.

Corporate complicity in international crimes is a largely neglected phenomenon that exists on the border of the criminological study of international crimes and the study of corporate crime. In this article, the German corporation Topf & Söhne is analysed as a case study of corporate involvement in international crimes. Topf built the cremation ovens for various concentration and extermination camps in Nazi Germany. It is clear that existing explanations of corporate crime such as the urge to survive, competition between sub-units, corporate culture, normalization and neutralization are applicable. However, the extraordinary circumstances of the Nazi regime had a crucial influence on the motivations, opportunity and lack of control that caused Topf’s involvement in the Holocaust.