Laura Bernal-Bermúdez – författare

The rights of victims to truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition when businesses are involved in past and present abuses are seldom guaranteed. A legacy of impunity has prevailed globally in which economic actors have incurred few legal or financial (indemnity) costs for violating behaviour. Examining cases in Nazi Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Perú, the Philippines and South Africa, this edited volume traces business accountability efforts. It identifies the tools applicable to different country contexts that have facilitated corporate accountability for human rights violations, while also flagging the barriers that persist. This volume presents the past and the present of accountability for corporations complicit in gross human rights violations, and also considers what the future may hold.

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.