Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties and international instruments
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The policy context of international crimes
- 3 Why corporations kill and get away with it: the failure of law to cope with crime in organizations
- 4 Men and abstract entities: individual responsibility and collective guilt in international criminal law
- 5 A historical perspective: from collective to individual responsibility and back
- 6 Command responsibility and Organisationsherrschaft: ways of attributing international crimes to the ‘most responsible’
- 7 Joint criminal enterprise and functional perpetration
- 8 System criminality at the ICTY
- 9 Criminality of organizations under international law
- 10 Criminality of organizations: lessons from domestic law – a comparative perspective
- 11 The collective accountability of organized armed groups for system crimes
- 12 Assumptions and presuppositions: state responsibility for system crimes
- 13 State responsibility for international crimes
- 14 Responses of political organs to crimes by states
- 15 Conclusions and outlook
- Index
3 - Why corporations kill and get away with it: the failure of law to cope with crime in organizations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties and international instruments
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The policy context of international crimes
- 3 Why corporations kill and get away with it: the failure of law to cope with crime in organizations
- 4 Men and abstract entities: individual responsibility and collective guilt in international criminal law
- 5 A historical perspective: from collective to individual responsibility and back
- 6 Command responsibility and Organisationsherrschaft: ways of attributing international crimes to the ‘most responsible’
- 7 Joint criminal enterprise and functional perpetration
- 8 System criminality at the ICTY
- 9 Criminality of organizations under international law
- 10 Criminality of organizations: lessons from domestic law – a comparative perspective
- 11 The collective accountability of organized armed groups for system crimes
- 12 Assumptions and presuppositions: state responsibility for system crimes
- 13 State responsibility for international crimes
- 14 Responses of political organs to crimes by states
- 15 Conclusions and outlook
- Index
Summary
Introduction
It is a sad truism that there is nothing that people will not do to other people. This may be at the individual level, as with the psychopathic serial murderer, but it is particularly the case with regard to collective behaviour. This can occur in groups, institutions and organizations driven by ideology, patriotism, extreme belief in a leader, kinship or clanship, by racial hatred or by religious fanaticism. People become absorbed in the group and, within its solidarity, restraints are removed and they commit acts they would almost certainly never contemplate doing as individuals. To a degree then, the organization or collective is complicit. Indeed, I argue that there is ample evidence to support the contention that ‘organizations kill’. In essence, I will maintain that there are no ‘individuals’ in organizations and that organizations commit ‘crimes’. This draws attention to the social-psychology of ‘deviant’ behaviour in organizations and I will lilustrate this with regard to policing and the business corporation. And in relation to the latter, I will argue that the law seems unable, or unwilling, to tackle the issue of corporate blame. It remains fixated on the individual and the organization too often manoeuvres successfully to evade the criminal label.
In addressing collective behaviour, Kelman argues that people within institutional settings are pressurised or persuaded into obedience. Those settings are rather like large-scale replications of Milgram's famous, or infamous, laboratory experiments.
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- System Criminality in International Law , pp. 42 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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