Business Operations in Armed Conflicts : An analysis of the criminal responsibilities of business executives operating in high-risk contexts

Abstract: The involvement of multinational corporations, international traders, transporters, processors, and retailers has a crucial significance in high-risk contexts there is a wide range of commercial activities that can make economic actors criminally responsible for gross violations of international humanitarian law and human rights: this includes the sale of weaponry, pillaging or commercial transactions unrelated to war. Allowing companies and their managers to shield themselves is harmful to the development of international law. Despite the fact that international criminal law does not foresee the criminal responsibility of legal entities, international criminal law does envisage the criminal responsibility of individuals, including those in charge of large-scale commercial activities. This thesis examines the manner in which international law regulates the complicity of business executives (in their capacity as company directors/officials) managing firms within the context of an armed conflict. Complicity is a subset of culpability that connects an accomplice to a primary actor's crime. This thesis examines the framework for evaluating complicity standards and suggests alternatives to normative prosecution of company leaders. I demonstrate that international criminal law regulates individual involvement in a comprehensive manner, employing the theories of incitement and aiding and abetting to inculpate complicit actors in international crimes, and these theories are differentiated by the extent of involvement in an unlawful complicitous activity, a threshold of knowledge of the fault needed of the accomplice, and a connection requirement between the accomplice's activities and the principal’s wrong. Similarly, it investigates the evolution of the concept of complicity in customary criminal law via tribunals and hybrid courts. It examines the evolution of complicity in light of social media, war sponsorship, and profit-motivated support provided to governments