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Bruno Tesch was tried and executed for his company’s Zyklon B gas used in Nazi Germany’s extermination camps. This book examines this trial and the more than 300 other economic actors who faced prosecution for the Holocaust’s crimes against humanity. It further tracks and analyses similar transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world. This book probes what these accountability efforts are, why they take place, and when, where, and how they unfold. Analysis of the authors’ original database leads them to conclude that ‘corporate accountability from below’ is underway, particularly in Latin America. A kind of Archimedes’ lever places the right tools in weak local actors’ hands to lift weighty international human rights claims, overcoming the near absence of international pressure and the powerful veto power of business.
“They [negotiators] sent by the palm oil companies and the paramilitaries] would tell us “if you don’t sell to us now, we will buy the land from your widow.” If we did not sell we would lose access to the land. The best-case scenario was to sell to them and become a partner in the economic enterprise. They started tightening their grip. We started to lose access to our lands. The only way to hold on to something was to give up our land. They said that they would buy the land, but that was a lie. They paid whatever they wanted because it was all done under threat.”
—Victim of forced displacement in Colombia
Laura Bernal-Bermúdez 