CHRIS STEPHEN: The War Crimes Industry Goes Corporate
Prepare for a new thing: Sweden is the vanguard in a coming wave of trials against corporate bad guys. They’re easier to nab than warlords. It’s good politics as well.
By Chris Stephen
Stockholm’s district courthouse looks like it was built for great things – a massive beige slab with dramatic red roof dominating the skyline. Architect Carl Westman, a leader of the Nordic Romantic movement, wanted Scandinavia to stop copying foreign styles and celebrate its own, drawing inspiration from castles of the medieval Vasa monarchy. It's a place for making history and now history is being made, as the “Stockholms Tingsratt” is the setting for the first corporate war crimes trial of the modern era.
In the dock are Ian Lundin, a Swede, and Alex Schneiter, a Swiss national, the former chairman and chief executive of Lundin Oil, once Sweden’s biggest oil corporation. They’re accused of aiding and abetting war crimes in Sudan committed a quarter century ago.
Lawsuits against mighty corporations are not new, but this is the first time corporate bosses have been hit with war crimes indictments (unless you count directors of Germany’s Krupp being accused of aiding the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials).
It’s only the beginning, though. Across Europe, other cases are underway. France has investigated fourteen companies for war crimes and next year will begin its first trial, of executives from construction giant Lafarge. They’re accused of collaborating with ISIS to commit crimes against humanity in Syria (Lafarge already admitted that collaboration two years ago in a US civil case brought by the FBI and Justice Department, paying a $778 million fine). Austria is investigating its own oil company OMV, again for involvement in Sudan atrocities. And Switzerland is probing mining conglomerates for business dealings with Congolese warlords.
These cases mark a tectonic shift in the direction of war crimes justice, to encompass not just warlords but the corporations who back them. It is recognition also of the role corporations have in the world’s wars, either in supplying arms or trading with warlords for oil, diamonds, gold or rare metals.
In launching these cases, prosecutors think they have the public behind them. Popular sentiment has for years opposed the excesses of some multi-national companies. No Hollywood producer ever went broke dramatizing fights between the little guy and Big Business. If the prosecution be believed, this case fits neatly into such a narrative.
On one side is a colossus of an oil company. The company has changed its name, but its successor entity is in the Lundin Group, a multi-billion dollar operation. Its historic successes as a buccaneering oil and gas prospector is written into the fabric of post-war Sweden. Founder Adolf Lundin enjoyed warm relations with Ronald Reagan and George Bush. For good measure, Adolf’s brother was head of Sweden’s intelligence service.
Arrayed against Lundin in the beginning was a tiny Dutch human rights group, Pax, which spent a decade gathering enough evidence for Swedish prosecutors to launch the current trial. A David, if you will, facing Goliath.
The trial opened in September last year and is centered on events in southern Sudan. When Lundin began drilling for oil, a rebel group attacked its base. Ian Lundin personally called on Sudan to use its army to secure the area, and the army did just that. Prosecutors say the soldiers were unable to distinguish rebel fighters from civilians, so they ethnically cleansed the population in brutal offensives that cleared oil fields of villagers, leaving at least ten thousand dead.
All that is disputed by the defendants, who are pleading not guilty. They insist fighting around the oil fields was part of a many-sided civil war, and not to do with them. The case has attracted massive publicity in Sweden, partly because former prime minister Carl Bildt is set to be a reluctant witness for the prosecution.
A key development is that these new trials are not against the corporations themselves, but the people who run them. Neither Europe or America yet allows criminal trials against companies, only their bosses. All the better, say many human rights groups, who think chief executives will pay more attention if the penalty for trading with war criminals is not just fines but prison.
These cases are also a reminder of how war crimes justice has evolved in recent years – a story of ambition and failure, egos and potential.
The first modern war crimes courts were opened in the 1990s by the United Nations. They were temporary affairs and have since closed. Then came the International Criminal Court, which has no connection to the UN after China, Russia and the United States objected to the idea, fearing an undermining of sovereignty. The ICC has not been a success, having jailed just five war criminals in its first twenty years of operation. For all the headlines about the Putin indictment and Gaza investigation, nobody from either case is likely to end up in the dock at The Hague.
Years ago, the ICC declared its intention to go after corporate mining giants who back warlords in Democratic Republic of Congo – but that went nowhere. Its prosecutors have the legal foundation to make it happen, but not, apparently, the nerve.
For one thing, corporate war crimes cases are hard: It’s not enough to prove a corporation benefits from trading with a murderous warlord, else much of Big Oil would be in the dock; rather, getting a conviction means proving corporate chiefs had some control over the crimes of those warlords. The difficulty of proof is the main reason the Lundin trial will be the longest in Swedish criminal history, with closing arguments not due until March 2026.
But while the ICC has faded in importance, war crimes trials at the national level are flourishing. Every state that signs the Geneva Conventions, which is almost all of them, has the power to hold war crimes trials. Only about a dozen actually do it, but the number is growing. Last year, Switzerland jailed its first war criminal.
Public sentiment is one reason why national war crimes prosecutors are focused on multinational companies. While the world’s warlords operate in distant mountains and forests, their corporate enablers work out of air-conditioned offices in Europe – an annoying posture that makes going after them good politics.
A lawyer with France’s Supreme Court told me prosecutors like corporate cases. Not only are their chief executive suspects easier to find than warlords, but a trawl through company files can provide a treasure-trove of evidence.
And there is another reason prosecutors like these cases. A reason you won’t find in any dry legal appraisal. A reason best expressed by a judge in the movie Fracture: “You know what nobody understands about certain kinds of low paid public service work ? Every now and then you get to put a stake in a bad guy’s heart.”
Chris Stephen is author of The Future of War Crimes Justice, published in February 2024 by Melville House (London and New York) and Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books, New York, 2005). He has reported on nine wars for many publications and has written about war crimes justice for The Guardian, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Petroleum Economist, and Counsel, the magazine of the Bar of England and Wales.
This all sounds fantastic but I sure hope that the civilians and the affected families of these countries receive the appropriate compensation due to them.