Opinion | A Paris Court Just Rewrote the Rules of Corporate Morality
As the judge read her verdict in Paris Criminal Court on Monday, police officers walked to the defense table to arrest Bruno Lafont, the 69-year-old former chief executive of one of the world’s largest cement manufacturers, Lafarge, and Christian Herrault, the 75-year-old former deputy head of operations.They would begin serving their prison sentences immediately: six and five years, respectively, for financing terrorism in Syria and beyond.Their individual sentences were striking, but the big news was something else: For the first time in France, and possibly for the first time ever, anywhere, an entire corporation had been put on trial and found criminally liable for enabling terrorism.
Two of the civil rights lawyers who brought the case were still beaming when I caught up with them a short while later by video at the courthouse.Claire Tixeire, of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, who spoke to me with her colleague Anna Kiefer, of the human rights organization Sherpa, said seeing a chief executive sentenced to prison was “exceptional.” Also exceptional was the scathing tone of Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez’s verdict, which took almost four hours to read.The court had concluded that between 2013 and 2014, the cement maker paid about $6.5 million to the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria, to facilitate the company’s operations there.
Lafarge — now owned by the Swiss conglomerate Holcim — will have to pay about $1.3 million in fines for the crime of financing terrorism and $5.3 million for violating international sanctions.In another case, Lafarge is facing charges of complicity in crimes against humanity.
If that case goes to trial and Lafarge is again found guilty, a new chapter in the prosecution of war crimes may begin.In the best-known war crimes prosecutions — at Nuremberg, in Jerusalem, in The Hague — most of the defendants were military or paramilitary officers.But at Nuremberg, industrialists who...