The Business End of Human Rights during Dictatorships and Armed Conflict: New Accountability Challenges for Transitional Justice

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

The aim of the roundtable is to discuss the presenters’ book published by Cambridge University Press in early 2019 entitled “The Business End of Human Rights during Dictatorships and Armed Conflict: New Accountability Challenges for Transitional Justice.” The book presents findings from an original global database on corporate accountability and transitional justice. The authors make three central claims. First, they show how corporate complicity is part of transitional justice initiatives (albeit largely invisible up to now) to address past authoritarian state and armed conflict violence. They provide data on accountability efforts in international, foreign, and domestic criminal and civil trials and truth commissions around the world. Second, the book explores the factors that have made it possible to hold economic actors accountable, specifically civil society demand and institutional innovators that can overcome the near absence of international pressure for accountability and the power of business veto players. Third, the book presents a model of “justice from below” to show that these efforts are underway primarily in the Global South. These efforts have a potential to transform international human rights, by holding economic actors accountable for those violations thereby addressing victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition, and second by contributing to international law-making. They use an Archimedes’ Lever analogy: the right tools even in the hands of weak actors have the potential to lift the weight of international human rights.

Sub Track

• Human Rights and Memory

Session Organizer

• Laura Bernal Bermúdez, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Chair

• Francesca Lessa, University of Oxford

Discussant

• Karina M Ansolabehere, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

Presenters

• Leigh A Payne, University of Oxford

• Jose Roberto Gabriel Pereira, University of Oxford

• Laura Bernal Bermúdez, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana