Events in the last 3 days just might advance a long overdue struggle to bring to justice violent marauders who have hitherto caused death and destruction in foreign countries with impunity. Not al Qaeda operatives on this occasion. This time it’s terrorists who are protected by some of the biggest and most powerful countries in the world. Shell has just been brought to court in the Netherlands for the first time over the environmental degradation caused by its oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Blackwater, the US security firm engaged in military protection contracts and privatised warfare, has been brought to court in the US after an incident in September 2007 when 17 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad by the company’s private security guards in an allegedly unprovoked shoot-out. In addition, a few months ago Trafigura, a British private oil dealer which had arranged for the dumping of tons of highly toxic waste oil in Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire which allegedly killed at least 15 people, was brought to court in the UK by families of the victims. All these break new ground in accountability, but international law in this area is still weak, uncertain, far too easily evaded, and urgently needs reform.

The results of these three legal actions have been very different, though each case exposes the efforts of the multi-national companies to stifle redress. Shell tried to prevent reparations in the Netherlands, where the company is headquartered, on the grounds that it was purely a Nigerian matter. The US judge in the Blackwater case, whilst not disputing the substance of the allegations, argued that the statements made by the 5 security guards had been obtained by the government promising that they would not be used against them in a criminal case, and therefore the evidence was tainted. Trafigura had for years tried to block revelation of what had happened by using libel lawyers in the UK to take out injunctions against anyone who made allegations in public, even to the extent of issuing super-injunctions threatening anyone who revealed that injunctions had been taken out. Clearly this fragmentary, piecemeal and inadequate framework of international accountability needs to tightened and formalised.
In a world of globalised trading the single most important breakthrough required is that all companies that operate internationally should be automatically liable at law for criminal offences not only in foreign countries where they operate, which may have a weak, ineffective or corrupt legal system, but also in the metropolitan country where their headquarters are located. Second, a fund should be established, to which all multinational companies should be required to contribute by levy in accordance with the extent of their international activities, and the victims of corporate depradations abroad would be entitled to claim assistance from this fund on a strict public interest basis. This is an area where a reforming government could blaze a trail in international justice which could begin to rebalance the extreme inequality of power between MNCs and the people in the developing world where they so often operate.

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