Commerce and Complicity: Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses as a Legacy of Nuremberg

This paper historicizes the post-1980s-era explosion of human rights-related litigation in US federal courts, by framing such litigation as unexpected legacies of Nuremberg.  The analysis opens with duality of the trials themselves, focusing on the gap between how the trials unfolded in real time and what the proceedings have come to stand for today. As a postwar symbol, these thirteen trials are now emblematic of a handful of particular qualities or lessons, each one of which is actually a significant distortion or misperception in its own way. 

First, it is common to see commentators invoking Nuremberg as a key moment of transformation for the concept of universal jurisdiction, the idea that there are certain kinds of offenses that are not linked to the geographic spot where the transgressions took place, but rather are linked to the egregious nature of the act itself.  The second dimension of Nuremberg as a human rights moment is the distillation of the idea of “crimes against humanity” – once again, a misperception that this legal label was somehow an innovation, but linked to the concept of universal jurisdiction in the sense that certain kinds of crimes would henceforth make the perpetrator an enemy of all mankind, and that this status in turn grows out of the underlying nature of the offense. The third dimension of Nuremberg as an iconic human rights moment is the most attenuated: the idea that the individual is an appropriate object of concern to the international community, either as a perpetrator or as a victim seeking redress.  

 All three of these dimensions feature in the human-rights-related transformations in U.S. federal courts, “reviving the Nuremberg ideal,” by expanding norms of accountability to encompass egregious human rights violations, including those in which U.S.-based corporations are complicitous.