The transitional justice (TJ) field has experienced a “corporate turn” in recent decades. Academics and civil society organizations and groups from the Global South have highlighted long-standing efforts by victims and their advocates to push the topic of corporate accountability into public debate and before state institutions in international, national, and subnational contexts. Institutional innovators, human rights lawyers, and state officials have channeled these claims, confronting state inertia and mandates blocking corporate accountability.
The Corporate Accountability and Transitional Justice (CATJ) database shows that, despite TJ’s focus on armed actors involved in structural violence, TJ mechanisms have responded to victims’ claims and taken on corporate complicity in past human rights violations. The CATJ records cases involving economic actors, encompassing firms, businesspeople, and business associations. The database, updated in 2024, records 420 mentions of economic actors included in judicial actions related to the Holocaust and World War II, 384 mentions in 28 of 57 (49%) final truth commission reports available to the public, 156 domestic and international judicial actions for corporate complicity in armed conflicts and dictatorships across the globe, and 439 economic actors included in a unique TJ mechanism in Colombia, the Justice and Peace rulings issued since 2011.
In Latin America, particularly Colombia and Argentina, important struggles and advances by victims in domestic courts have helped change TJ practices regarding corporate accountability. These countries not only have the highest number of judicial actions, but they also have civil society organizations that continue to demand justice through new legal actions and, in the case of Colombia, the Jurisdiction for Peace that emerged from the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. Victims and their advocates are looking for innovative ways to bring economic actors to account through domestic courts and local alliances—consolidating an effort from below rather than relying on actors in the Global North.
This “corporate turn” breaks with the liberal and statist bias in traditional approaches to transitional justice, which tends to focus on state or state-like (rebel or paramilitary) perpetrators. However, including corporate accountability in these efforts sheds light on the economic and political power structures underlying authoritarian regimes and armed conflict. As Bowsher states, by uncovering economic actors’ role in financing, instigating, committing, perpetuating, and knowingly profiting from past violence, TJ exposes the collaboration between political and economic elites in violently consolidating and reproducing socioeconomic inequalities. This approach acknowledges the fundamental role certain economic actors played in that violence. The corporate turn exposes the root causes of past violence, linking physical integrity rights and economic, social, and cultural rights—a lacuna, or missing puzzle piece, in transitional justice approaches.
Judicial accountability efforts from below have brought innovative litigation strategies, allowing victims and their advocates to apply categories of crimes that are better suited to address the atrocity than more generic international crimes. For example, in Colombia, the case against Urapalma S.A. is unprecedented, the first of several criminal and human rights cases where victims and their advocates set out to prove in court that economic actors were direct perpetrators of forced displacement and environmental harms, the former traditionally linked to paramilitary and guerrilla violence, and the latter not previously linked to armed conflict.
Furthermore, ground-breaking legal strategies have reached courts that have not traditionally been used in TJ. In Argentina, victims have resorted to labor tribunals to pursue accountability. In the Siderca and Techint cases, which delivered different accountability outcomes, institutional innovators have linked the international conceptualization of crimes against humanity with employers’ duties to protect workers, which are enshrined in national labor legislation. This approach recognizes a company’s duty to respect and protect human rights and remedy abuses, as well as overcoming the standard application of statutes of limitations in worker safety cases.
Finally, judicial strategies have been advanced even when amnesty laws foreclose justice. In Brazil, union members and human rights groups brought a case against Volkswagen to civil courts. The claimants were fully aware that the general amnesty law enacted during the dictatorship retained its legal standing and would protect the company from prosecution for human rights violations. They envisioned the case as a preliminary prosecutorial investigation allowed under the amnesty law. As the prosecutors did not request a formal trial, amnesty did not apply to the case. Prosecutors could then produce evidence demonstrating the company’s involvement in human rights violations. In this way, the case employed the innovative legal mechanism of a truth trial.
The five-year prosecutorial investigations resulted in an agreement between the company, the public prosecutorial offices, and the workers’ unions. Although some agreement terms were controversial, as highlighted by some human rights activists and academics, it advanced some important components regarding truth and reparations. For example, it included individual and collective financial reparations to fund initiatives advancing collective rights and promoting “truth and memory” for the dictatorship’s human rights violations. It also provided for the construction of a memorial site and academic research on the involvement of other companies in crimes against humanity in Brazil. The company was also obligated to issue a public statement about the facts verified by the investigation.
Although still marginal, international attention regarding corporate complicity has begun to grow. In 2022, the UN Working Group made a substantial and explicit connection between transitional justice and corporate accountability. It recognized that economic actors conducting business in conflict-affected areas must carry out heightened human rights due diligence and adopt a conflict-sensitive approach in decisions that affect local populations.
The Inter-American system has also reviewed individual cases of corporate complicity. In 2021, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights made its first corporate accountability case decision. This case was brought against the Ford Motor Company for a worker illegally detained on the company’s premises during the dictatorship. Previously, in the 1980s, Argentine courts had refused the worker’s claim, alleging that the statute of limitations applied to labor claims against companies. The Inter-American Commission ruled that such a decision violated victims’ rights to justice and reparations. The decision was followed by “a friendly settlement” signed by the Argentine state and the victim’s representatives before the Inter-American Commission.
The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also issued measures to protect Afro-Colombian communities and ordered the state to prosecute palm oil companies involved in the violent forced displacement of these communities from their lands. In 2020, the Inter-American Commission’s special rapporteur on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights identified an impunity gap involving businesses complicit in human rights violations across the Americas. It called on states to implement urgent policies to achieve truth, justice, memory, and reparations for such violations.
TJ’s “corporate turn” has yielded remarkable developments in Latin America and has gained increasing attention in the international human rights field. However, obstacles to accountability persist in many national courts. Economic actors cannot prevent the initiation of legal claims, but they can delay the litigation process through legal procedural maneuvers, thus securing de facto impunity. As a result, advocates of accountability must develop innovative legal mobilization strategies to guarantee that judicial investigations are not shelved indefinitely.